Research Facilities & Collections

Just minutes from campus, the lab for marine education and research includes a system that recirculates seawater, a remotely operated underwater vehicle, a wet laboratory for rearing marine invertebrates and fishes, and a culture room for larval invertebrates and algae.

Aboard Humboldt’s 90-foot ocean going research and teaching vessel, students can collect and observe marine plants and animals in their natural environment. The Coral Sea has two labs inside and the deck space to give students the room to work with box cores, dredges, nets and other large oceanographic equipment.

A globally recognized leader in clean and renewable energy technology research, the Center’s work involves technology demonstration, project development, energy systems analysis, and education and training. It also performs feasibility studies, resource assessments, and energy planning studies.

This is one of the largest teaching collections of living plants in California, with 11,500 square feet of instructional display space and more than 1,000 plant species in 187 families.

The CNRS Core is a community laboratory workspace to provide training and experimental research experience to a variety of academic disciplines. This space is utilized by both faculty and students and include specialized equipment and instrumentation for training and research projects of all kinds.  

As the second largest museum of its kind in the California State University system, the vertebrate museum houses 8,750 specimens, including skins and skeletal material from a variety of terrestrial, aquatic, marine, and volant mammals.

With a strong emphasis on the flora of northwest California and southwest Oregon this facility has more than 104,000 specimens. It’s also a botanical resource for students and faculty, as well as community members and professional botanists.

This museum’s collection is mainly from California’s North Coast, and includes specimens from 47 U.S. states and 46 countries. It’s emphasis is on birds, with over 15,000 specimens, plus nearly 3,000 mammal and skeletal material in the collection.

CalPoly Humboldt’s fire lab is one of the best-equipped university fire research facilities in the United States, and includes a fire platform, ventilation hood, and a thermal imaging camera used in the lab and during wildland fires.

The campus fish hatchery has a recirculating freshwater system with incubators, troughs, fiberglass circular tanks, concrete circular tanks, and raceways.

This is a physics laboratory for uses like short-range tests of Newton's 1/r2 law and the Weak Equivalence Principle, searching for new fundamental forces, and investigating the mechanism behind dark energy.

This observatory features a new 16-inch telescope and a 12-inch telescope—both GPS-located and computer-controlled—as well as several smaller telescopes.