Teaching
As an educator, my role is to promote learning in an atmosphere that inspires creativity, interest, and critical thinking. I believe education should go beyond routine memorization and lecture-driven learning, and that students learn best when there is a captivating opportunity to share and discuss new information.
My teaching philosophy is built upon the following:
- Fundamentals versus critical thinking skills
- Learning Outcomes and Teaching Modules
- Learning Through Engagement
- Diverse Assessments
Course Development
Evolution of Molecules and Cells
Microbial Ecology As part of a graduate education course, I developed a broad microbial ecology course. This course covers the fundamentals of microbial ecology in three main sections: populations, communities, and ecosystems. Populations: students explore population growth and simple population models. Communities: students explore the developments in microbial community ecology and core ecological theory. Ecosystems: students explore biogeochemistry and how environmental conditions drive ecosystem function.
Course Materials:
Previous Courses
Quantitative Biodiversity
Years Taught: 2016
Graduate-level course that focuses on theory, patterns, metrics, and tools used to study biodiversity. Students calculate diversity metrics, generate and quantify diversity relationships, visualize multivariate data, and conduct phylogenetic tests. Students use modern statistical computing and graphics environments (i.e., R), as well as version control tools (i.e., GitHub). See previous course website for more information.
- repo: https://github.com/quantitativebiodiversity
- website: http://documentup.com/QuantitativeBiodiversity/QuantitativeBiodiversity
Microbial Metagenomics
Years Taught: 2011, 2012
Graduate-level course that focused the teaching students general skills in microbial metagenomics. Lessons included: hypothesis generation, sample collection and processing, sequencing methods, sequence data analysis, general statistics, hypothesis testing approaches.
Environmental Microbiology
Years Taught: 2013
Undergraduate-leve course designed to introduce students with the fundamental skills needed in environmental microbiology including how experiments are: designed, performed, analyzed, and communicated.
Introductory Microbiology Lab
Years Taught: 2012
Undergraduate-level course that focused on teaching the fundamental skills needed for microbiology
Introductory Biology Lab
Years Taught: 2011, 2013,
Undergraduate-level course that focused on cellular and molecular biology fundamentals.