Brian Teague, Ph.D.

As a newer member of our community, there may be folks who aren’t familiar with you yet. To you, what are some of the things that you deem most important for us to know about you as a fellow community member?

Well, on National Coming Out Day [Celebrated annually on October 11th], it seems appropriate to share that I am a gender queer person in STEM and that is a relatively new kind of a self realization. When I kind of figured that out a couple of years ago, a lot more of my life made a lot more sense. Also, it’s really important to me to be proudly out and who I am, particularly in STEM. There aren't many of us, gender queer folk in STEM. The other thing is that I am one of the most sincere people you will ever meet. Like, painfully. So, I do not have a sarcasm detector, and if you are saying something sarcastic, you have to hit me across the face with it.

Since coming to Trinity one year ago, what has been something that has surprised you?

I came to Trinity from a regional public university up in Northwest Wisconsin, and I absolutely believe deeply in the role that those kinds of institutions play in allowing students who don't have the kind of privilege of being able to come to somewhere like Trinity, to still have access to higher education. [University of Wisconsin-] Stout and similar schools are great places. They're important places. They need to be supported more and also there, it felt like there were a lot of people who were just doing their job because that was the job that they had. Around here, every single person understands the mission, right? Every single person from our fantastic departmental administrative staff to our lab manager to my colleagues who are professors, to the folks in administration, we are all here for our students and their education and their betterment and that kind of universality of purpose is amazing. Absolutely amazing. It gives me a real sense of the privilege I have of being here too.

For those of us who do know you, we know that much of your lab research is centered around yeast and its role in fundamental biology but what brought you to your research on yeast and what are your hopes for the impact that it will have? 

As I mentioned, my last five years before Trinity were spent at a regional public university where research and scholarship were an expected part of the job and the resources were pretty thin on the ground, so yeast was and is an easy to grow organism. It doesn't require much in the way of resources to do experiments on it. If you have to go away and do something else for three months, you could stick it in the freezer and pull it back out. You can't do that with mice, right? That was kind of the initial impetus for using this as an experimental organism. 

Then I had a student sit down in my office and say, "Dr. Teague, I want to study cancer." I was like, “Ben, didn't you see the sign on the door? This is a yeast lab!” But his pitch was a good reminder to me that yeast is an extraordinarily well understood eukaryotic model organism. The things that are true in yeast cells are true in human cells. Yeast are also a really widely used organism for doing other kinds of interesting biotechnology, for making drugs, for synthesizing chemicals and drug precursors. It's super easy to genetically engineer and that's led to this kind of dual interest on my part. Some of the folks in my lab are interested in doing biotechnology things with it, some are interested in leveraging our ability to make interesting chemicals used in bioprocessing.

The other part of my lab is interested in fundamental cell biology that could have real impact on human health. [Also,] we're interested in how cells decide to die. How cells make a decision to undergo programmed cell death. Cancer cells don't do that like they're supposed to. Cells in the retina that are undergoing macular degeneration are doing that when they're not supposed to. Understanding these fundamental processes in a really well understood, easy to manipulate, easy to grow, easy to experiment on, model organism could really give us good and useful insight into, like modern human health and human disease as well. 

I’m always looking for students to join the work from freshmen on up. If you need to be trained to hold a micropipette, I can train you!

Your pedagogy and how you interact with your students is very important as you are always present at Collaborative events to better understand how to be a better teacher for your students. Who or what are some of your pedagogical influences and are there any specific materials that helped you grow as a pedagogue? 

I've got two for you and the first is the book that I brought along. This book is titled How Learning Works. It's by Susan Ambrose et al, and it is an excellent practical distillation of what we know about how students learn and how we can change our pedagogy to better meet them where they are to interact with brains, the way we know that brains work. Every single person who stands in front of an undergraduate classroom should read this book. Every single one of them. It's easy to dip into and out [and] it's written in a really accessible way. It has lots of practical tips and tricks-it's just the best. 

The other person who has had an ongoing influence on the way I think about teaching and learning is a professor named Kevin Gannon. In particular, he wrote a blog post a number of years ago that he turned into a book called Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. I'm going to read a few bits out of it that really speak to me. 

He starts, “If I want my students to take risks and not be afraid to fail, then I need to take risks and not be afraid to fail.” [Next,] “learning cannot occur without metacognition and reflection. This applies to both us and our students.” [Followed by,] “our students are not us. If we merely teach how we prefer to learn, we exclude a majority of our students. They're not deficiencies, they're data points for our pedagogical decisions.” [Gannon also states] “Much of what we do in the classroom cannot be quantified, and yet cannot be quantified is not the same as cannot be measured. [He continues,] we can't demonstrate student learning. We are not doing it.” “When you say rigor, I think of corpses.” “Coverage for coverage's sake, is where learning goes to die.” Kevin Gannon has strong opinions on this. He ends with, “No matter what, teaching is a radical act of hope” and certainly in our current world, that last bit is really true, that it can be really dispiriting to feel like [you’re] shouting into a hurricane, and yet, coming here and doing this work is the way that I want to change the world, the way that I see myself having an impact on the world and on our future. That's why I'm here and I know that a lot of my colleagues share that as well.