Research

Inequities in university science courses

Whether or not a person completes a 4-year undergraduate degree is the single biggest driver of income inequality, thus a significant obstacle to socio-economic mobility in the US. Said another way, instead of ameliorating income inequality, higher education is exacerbating it. The problem is worse in STEM disciplines where students from minoritized groups enter STEM majors at the same rate as their over-represented peers but abandon these majors at much higher rates.

Despite widespread effort to increase access to and diversity in STEM, women, low income and racially minoritized students remain underrepresented in both STEM majors and STEM professions. Educational inequities in college (i.e., differential performance between students) likely contribute to this problem because lower performing students are probably more likely to drop out and less likely to major in STEM fields. Research in my lab on this topic focuses on: 1) quantitatively describing inequities in higher education, with the express intent of 2) understanding what instructors can do to disrupt inequities in their classes. 

A current project expands on our recent meta-analysis to explore the course features and instructor behaviors that promote equity in STEM classes. While we know that active learning can promote equity, active learning alone is not enough - some instructors who use active learning disrupt inequities and some instructors exacerbate them. This 5-year, NSF-funded project will begin to identify course features and instructor behaviors that promote equity and will create user-friendly data processing and interpretation tools so that instructors can implement meaningful change in their class - now.

Critical elements in Active Learning classrooms

I am interested in the best way(s) to teach biology to undergraduate students. Problems such as how to teach about climate change or the intersection of quantitative reasoning in biology classrooms, remain broad interests of mine.

One project I have worked on asked if students learn more from working through local examples of biological impacts of climate change or global examples of biological impacts of climate change. You can read the results in the paper. (Spoiler: women learn more if they study local examples!)

Another project investigated group dynamics and how inequitable participation in small groups hinders student performance. That paper was featured in the media!
- In the Chronicle of Higher Education
- On the STEM prof listserve (parent website here)
- In the University of Washington news 

I am recruiting undergraduate students to continue investigating these questions. If you are interested, please contact me!

Global change and community-driven science

Community-driven science (CS) is a growing movement that enlists the general public in scientific research. But does CS operate at scales (both temporal and spatial) sufficient to address pressing global change issues and global biodiversity loss? And to what extent is CS integrated into Western academic science? 

My interest in Community-driven science started as a graduate student as I helped create MeadoWatch, a program at Mount Rainier designed to monitor the impact of climate on flowering phenology. In addition to helping create a project, I also helped conduct a large-scale meta-analysis of the extent and efficacy of Biodiversity CS worldwide. You can find our publications here. This work was also cited in a White House memo (found here) and on Huffington Post (found here)!

I continue to be interested in CS and more broadly in informal education as a way of making science accessible to all people. I have several continuing and new collaborations in these areas.

Climate change and plants and their pollinators

I trained as a climate change ecologist and as such, my research focused on the impacts of climate change on plant communities and how interactions between plants and pollinators may mediate plant responses to climate change. 1) As the climate has warmed, many species have shifted their timing of flowering (phenology) in response. For many species, spring is happening earlier. What are the community-level implications of these individual shifts? 2) Many plant species have shifted their ranges both pole-ward and up in elevation, and these shifts are not predicted to cease. However, biotic interactions can also determine species range limits, making climate-induced shifts less likely. Does pollination play a role in determining plant species distributions? You can find the answers I found to many of these questions in my publications!

I continue to collaborate on projects asking about post-flowering phenological stages as well as using satellite imagery to predict flowering phenology.

This work has been featured in the media! - During National Science Foundation's pollinator week June 21, 2018- On KING5 news, the local TV news station on November 6, 2017- In the University of Washington news on November 7, 2017- On the front page of the Seattle Times on August 20, 2012 - In the Tacoma News Tribune on December 21, 2014- In a video about People of Rainier on November 1, 2016

Twice, pictures I have taken were selected as cover images in association with my publications:

- November 2017 issue of Ecology.
- February 2016 issue of American Journal of Botany.