PHILOSOPHY
Quantitative skills are the foundation of all scientific inquiry, empowering students to uncover patterns, build and test hypotheses, and draw meaningful conclusions from data. My mission is to equip students with these essential skills to understand and engage with the complexities of the natural world. By instilling a strong foundation in data literacy, I aim to create empowered, educated citizens who can navigate ecological or environmental careers. It is my goal to get students excited about learning science and statistics, challenging them to connect with content that is relevant to their lives and interests.
My teaching philosophy centers on fostering critical thinking through discussions and active engagement. I am committed to breaking down barriers to accessing quantitative methods, ensuring that every student feels confident and supported in tackling challenging concepts in my classroom. Courses under my guidance will emphasize data analysis and interpretation, encouraging students to participate in scientific discourse about ecology and environmental science. With these objectives in mind, I design my courses around active learning experiences, including in-class coding exercises, written reflections, and scientific communication through diverse media. As an educator, I aim to facilitate broad engagement in science through an inclusive and adaptive teaching style, meeting individual students needs. To ensure this goal, I (1) create a curriculum that draws on diverse, real world examples and communicate it through varied means to make the content accessible across student backgrounds and aptitudes, (2) approach all courses and mentoring with a focus on student outcomes, and (3) solicit and implement feedback to continually revise and improve my teaching.
EXPERIENCE
Co-Instructing
At the University of Montana, I served as the co-instructor for a graduate course on Bayesian Modeling for Ecological Problems. In this class, students learn the basics of Bayesian inference and a wide variety of applications before completing a final semester project analyzing their own research questions with data sets of their choice. Most students use this opportunity to work toward a chapter of their dissertation, adding in quantitative elements that would not have otherwise been available to them. As a co-instructor, I lectured the class, assisted students with in-class coding exercises, and mentored them on their final projects.
Mentoring Undergraduate Projects and Theses
At the Flathead Lake Biological station, I am a mentor for summer undergraduate interns. This competitive internship program is a 10-week research experience for students where they conduct an independent research project and present their findings at a symposium. My interns have learned how to design experiments, conduct laboratory assays, and analyze their data using R. Two of my interns have continued on with their summer projects and turned them into honors senior theses that I advised.
Teaching Assistantships
As a PhD student, I served as a TA for Field Ecology (Bio 360) for two semesters. This is an advanced, field-based course with 12-15 students. Students learn to make observations and develop scientific questions about ecosystems with my hands-on guidance in the field. The students are encouraged to submit re-writes on their written work; as the TA, I provide feedback on the first drafts to help them develop their writing skills. Through this course, I have become familiar with the expected content of a 300-level science class and the abilities of a typical student enrolled at this level. Student feedback from both semesters has helped me focus on my strengths of individual mentoring and inspiring enthusiasm in the classroom and work on improving in other areas. In Spring 2021, I was the TA for Ecology (Bio 209), an introductory course for biology majors with ~60 students. I assisted students with in class activities and with understanding and applying the material they learned on their individual projects that they completed three times throughout the semester. On multiple occasions, I guest lectured for this class, teaching the topics of nutrient cycling and ecosystems ecology, incorporating themes from my own research. Because spring 2021 was conducted entirely online, I incorporated breakout room activities where the students read papers in a jigsaw fashion and were able to discuss with their peers who had read the same paper and then share with the other students who had read different papers.
Before starting at Duke, I worked for a year as a full-time professional TA for the Semester in Environmental Science program at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, MA. I learned to manage student lab and field work and run sessions to complete problem sets and review course content. Each student completed an independent research project as their full-time activity for the final six weeks of the course. As the TA, I was the first line of assistance for each step in the scientific process as the 39 undergraduates completed their research projects.
Teaching Data Science
Data science is a powerful tool for asking broad scale ecological questions and gaining insight into big data sets and global patterns. I believe it is an essential tool for students in ecology, empowering them to understand results and statistics they read and to create and implement their own models and analyses with publicly available data sources. During my PhD, I have developed material for teaching undergraduate students about using R statistical software as part of a data expedition class. During the class, students were guided through step by step examples of using R to draw correlations on an example dataset. With the tools to get started, they explored data of their own and used R to generate plots for their completed lab reports.
In Summer 2019, I mentored a group of advanced undergraduates and masters students as part of the Duke Data+ program. Over the course of the summer, the team developed software to clean and visualize time series data, using tools from both R and Python. Throughout the 10-week program, these students became more advanced at specific programming tasks than I am - it was my task as their mentor to serve as a resource for how to self-teach data skills and how to know what tools would be needed to reach the desired outcome. The students produced a data pipeline that will be implemented on the streampulse database.
Guest Lecturing
In Spring Semester 2020, I was invited to guest lecture in the undergraduate environmental sciences course ENV 102. This is an introductory course of ~100 students. I was asked to speak about water ecosystems as they tie to urbanization and social justice issues at global and local scales. Throughout my lecture, students were able to test their understanding of concepts and interact in small groups through multiple think-pair-share activities.
K-12 teaching
During my first year at Duke, three of my fellow ecology students and I founded and ran the first year of GALS – Girls on outdoor Adventure for Leadership and Science. As part of this free hands-on science course, I designed and implemented the geology lesson plans. Leading field lessons I learned to adapt my teaching based on active feedback from students, all of whom came from different backgrounds and education levels. This work built on my previous experience working with middle and high school students as a mentor for an advanced mathematics summer camp, MathPath, and as a volunteer for several STEM outreach programs.
Pedagogy Training
Through the Certificate in College Teaching Program at Duke, I have completed coursework and participated in peer feedback to improve my teaching skills:
· Fundamentals of College Teaching: GS 750
· College Teaching and Course Design: GS 755
· College Teaching and Visual Communication: GS760
Courses I can teach
I am prepared and qualified to teach courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level in both the ecological sciences and statistics. An example syllabus I have designed for a field-based freshwater science course can be found here.