Teaching
As the number and scope of environmental challenges has grown in recent years, my passion for training the next generation of environmental problem solvers has grown in parallel. In my teaching, I focus on providing an environment where students can develop their field work, communication, and quantitative skills. In the past, I have taught lab courses, lectures, and workshops in:
Limnology
Statistical computing with R
Science Communication
Zoology
Fish Ecology
Our careers depend on our ability to communicate effectively. Communicating effectively helps others to learn from our work, recognize its message, and integrate that message into their understanding of how the world works. However, many scientists are under-trained in how to communicate their science effectively. I gave this workshop in 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2023 in support of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network Student Association. In the workshop, I present three simple guidelines that can help us get funding, write well-structured manuscripts, and design effective posters and oral presentations.
Here we are doing an improv activity to get us thinking about how to take other peoples' perspective--a key part of effective science communication.
Aquatic scientists often take a discretized view of waterbodies—they classify them, divide them into zones, promote discrete management targets, and use research tools, experimental designs, and statistical analyses focused on discretization. By offering useful shortcuts, this approach to aquatic ecology has benefited the way we understand, manage, and communicate about waterbodies. But the research questions and the research tools in aquatic science are changing rapidly in the era of big data, with consequences for the relevance of our current discretization schemes. In this invited lecture, I examine how and why we discretize and argue that rethinking the extent to which we must discretize gives us an exceptional chance to advance aquatic ecology in new ways.
In 2015, I taught a three-day, hands-on workshop about how to use advanced statistical computing
to address problems of conservation concern in Gabon.
Learn more below.
CTR Newsletter 2015 Final small (1).pdf