It's very research based. Research experiences are integrated right into the program in the form of lab courses, and you also have the option to work one-on-one with profs in independent library studies, research projects, and an honours thesis (if you want to). For this reason, and because of our small class sizes, PNB gives the benefit of having a lot of professors you can get references from later. I know that's an issue for a lot of upper year life scis looking to apply to grad school who find that they don't know many profs on a name-to-name basis.
There's no pressure to focus on research if you're not interested in it, though. Since you get a lot of elective space in the program, you can take courses from anywhere you like, so you can definetly still take life science courses if you're interested in them
I may be biased, but PNB is an amazing program, very close knit with awesome professors doing incredible research. We're all very close and our class sizes are smaller, so if that's something that is important to you, keep it in mind.
