On Teaching

My primary goal in teaching is for all students to develop scientific literacy through the cultivation of their own understanding of what biology is and how it is done.  To do this, I emphasize the foundations of biological theory as well as the development of critical thinking skills embedded in hands' on research experiences.

My emphasis on both the theory and the methods of biology allows me to blend research experiences directly into more traditional classroom approaches, facilitating connections between students’ formal coursework and research experiences. For example, in my both my Conservation Biology and Immunology courses, where lectures play a large role, students gain better insight into the complexity of these systems by working directly with an unpublished dataset. Students ask questions of this dataset, analyze the data, and present their findings to their classmates and invited guests. In my collaboratively-taught Ecological Modeling course, students modeled disease transmission patterns using traditional modeling techniques in R, allowing students to understand the spatial dynamics of ecological processes while becoming familiar with different approaches to answer these questions. A crucial component of my Parasitology class is to teach both the life cycles of parasites and the significance of parasites in their ecosystems. My students have successfully explored the relationship between these concepts by dissecting out parasites from recent ‘automotively-culled’ wildlife and following up their findings with research into the ecology of both host and parasite. In a collaborative opportunity, I brought together students in my Parasitology course with students in my Ecological Modeling course to explore how raccoons use the urban landscape to spread Baylisascaris procyonis, examining how different transmission strategies and modified landscapes alter the distribution of infected raccoons. By bringing research into the classroom, I couple foundational tenets with research experiences, showing students that biology is more than a body of facts.

Mentoring students is an important part of my research program. I work with students to develop their own research projects, while concurrently training them in research methods. Students working with me have taken on projects in population and landscape genetics, parasitology, modeling, primatology, conservation biology, and the products of these research experiences include students earning competitive research grants, presentations at regional, national, and international conferences, and authorships on peer-reviewed publications. Students first begin in the lab by reading broadly across relevant literature. From this, students identify a research project of interest and considers the best possible dataset & methods needed to tackle his or her research question. As students become comfortable with research practices, our focus shifts to developing analytical methods and to the clear presentation of their research findings, with a goal of presenting their findings at a conference or co-authoring a manuscript. 

In conclusion, students may move on to fields outside of biology, but developing the skills necessary to succeed in biology is a valuable asset in whatever direction they pursue.  In all aspects of my teaching, I focus on inclusive pedagogy, engaging students in the classroom and teaching what biology is by actively involving my students in biological research in the classroom and by emphasizing the development of their critical thinking skills, scientific literacy, and ability to communicate clearly.