The Department of Biochemistry has established research strengths in the molecular basis of health and disease, nutritional biochemistry, structure-function relationships, and food science. Modern proteomic and genomic research techniques are integrated throughout department programming at undergraduate and graduate student levels

The Department of Biology has developed research strengths in marine biology, boreal forests, and experimental biology linked to biochemistry, medicine and field-oriented programs in environmental biology.

The Department of Chemistry has core research programs in organic and inorganic synthetic chemistry, materials chemistry, computational chemistry, green chemistry, mass spectrometry, and marine environmental chemistry.

The Department of Computer Science has active research in algorithm design, artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioinformatics, bio-inspired computing, data analytics, computational science, computer graphics, vision and image processing, human-machine interactions, robotics, computer networking, and complex networks.

The Department of Earth Sciences has four areas of current strength: sedimentary and petroleum geology; geochemistry, petrology, and economic geology; geophysics; and environmental geoscience/hydrogeology.

The Department of Mathematics and Statistics has core areas of research in mathematics are algebra, analysis, combinatorics, differential equations and dynamical systems, fluid mechanics, geometry and topology, mathematical methods and modeling/numerical optimization, mathematical physics, numerical analysis and scientific computing. Core areas of research in statistics are biostatistics, business and industrial statistics, econometric models, environmental and financial processes, general applied statistics, non-parametric statistics, sampling, statistical genetics, theory of statistics and probability.

The Department of Ocean Sciences has research programs focusing on processes in cold oceans and marine organisms: biological oceanography, aquatic ecology, fisheries and aquaculture, with emphasis on the behavioural, physiological, biochemical and molecular processes that are fundamental to these themes.

The Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography has active research in quantum materials, magnetism, soft and biological materials, statistical mechanics, laser spectroscopy, sensors, photonics, numerical modeling and simulation, laboratory fluid dynamics, and physical oceanography.

The Department of Psychology's research clusters include behavioural neuroscience, clinical psychology, cognition, developmental psychology, social psychology, and cognitive and behavioural ecology.