Teaching & Workshops

Officially a brand-new course in Winter 2020! (Replaces my former 3000-level Ecology course. ) With an emphasis on active learning classroom methods, this lecture/lab course introduces students to quantitative analysis of ecological systems including population dynamics, species interactions, biodiversity, and energy flow through ecosystems. Students work collaboratively to test ecological hypotheses, simulate ecological dynamics, and find solutions to ecological problems. Fulfills the upper-level lab, 4000-level lecture, and Systems Biology area requirements for the Biology B.S. program. The lab also counts as a Field Experience.

This lecture/lab course covers medically important protozoan, helminth, and arthropod parasites, including their morphology, biology, pathogenesis, clinical manifestations, immunology, dynamics, and control. Both lecture and lab classes emphasize working collaboratively to find solutions to common clinical and epidemiological problems. Offered every other Fall semester. Fulfills the upper-level lab and 4000-level lecture requirements for the Biology B.S. program.

Graduate level introduction to the design and analysis of manipulative and natural experiments, emphasizing the practical use of statistics for analyzing common types of data in the biological sciences. Students learn to implement standard experimental designs, conduct various statistical analyses in Program R, present data according to graphical design principles, and evaluate the rigor of published experiments. Offered every other Fall semester.

As part of the educational component of Raffel's NSF-CAREER project, he designed and organized new classroom lab activities focused on Thermal Biology and its links with Chemistry and Physics. In these activities, students conduct experiments to measure effects of temperature on metabolic rates for warm- and cold-blooded animals (humans and frogs). They then compare their results to the temperature-dependence of and heat production by an enzyme-catalyzed chemical reaction (hydrogen peroxide decomposition), to test hypotheses about why temperature has different effects on metabolic rates of different animals.

• Introductory Biology Lab (BIO 1201) - foundational course for students studying Biology and Health Sciences at OU

• Project Upward Bound Summer Academy - program for aspiring college students from local high schools

• A link to an online Shiny application used for virtual data analysis for this lab activity can be found here. To submit a ticket or provide feedback for the application, please fill out this Google Form.

Raffel organizes an annual 2-day intensive summer teaching workshop for graduate teaching assistants at Oakland University, in collaboration with Joanne Lipson Freed from the Department of English. The workshop is designed to introduce effective practices commonly used in taught by teaching assistants (e.g., lab courses, discussion sections, or supplementary instruction). Workshops are supported in part by the Office of the Provost, Graduate Education, the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), and the National Science Foundation.