Teaching & Supervision

To offer students the opportunities for hands-on learning experiences and to foster scientific thinking, I try to actively engage students in my research projects, as much as possible. I had 10 different undergraduate students involved in my research projects over the last few years, who I mentored and supervised on the acquisition of various skills from field techniques to running hormone assays in the laboratory. Besides the practical skills, I also try to involve the students in planning, conducting, and analysing the scientific projects, which has led to several of the undergrad students conducting their thesis projects under my supervision. I also had the opportunity to co-supervise and mentor other MSc and PhD students (please see my CV for details) and am an active mentor in the mentoring programme of the Animal Behaviour Collective.

In am teaching modules from the “BIO144 Data Analysis in Biology” course at University of Zurich, and I have also developed and taught my own 1-day intensive course on “Statistical data analysis” for an MSc course at University of Konstanz. I believe that a solid foundation in data analysis, taught in an approachable way and including both statistical and computational foundations, is crucial for students who want to take a path into research, but has also become increasingly more important in most other areas of biology. I am also teaching MSc students about "Developmental effects on behaviour" as part of an Animal Behaviour lecture series at Uni Konstanz. I strive to further improve my teaching competencies with formal training for which I am currently working to obtain the “Baden-Württemberg-Zertifikat für Hochschuldidaktik” (Baden-Württemberg certificate for university didactics) programme, issued by the German Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts (200 working units).