teaching

General Biology and Fundamentals of Science

At the University of Connecticut, I have taught multiple semesters of Foundations of Biology (BIO1102), which fulfills the lab science requirement for non-science majors. I ardently enjoy teaching this course—I love the opportunity to be someone’s last science teacher. I see it as the chance to equip them with the knowledge and skills they need to navigate scientific information as an educated citizen. It is also that one last chance to change how they see themselves in connection with the discipline of science.

Bioinformatics and computer science

I have also been a teaching assistant for upper-division and graduate-level bioinformatics courses, including Big Data for Biologists (EEB4100) and Bioinformatics and Genomics Applications (EEB5859). I am a trained Software Carpentry instructor. As part of the Software Carpentry working group at UConn, I have taught workshops about using the command line to novices. For more advanced students, I have introduced the data manipulation packages from “the Tidyverse” and shown how to use R and R-markdown to achieve reproducible research. Methods courses like these are very exciting to teach, because they can be downright transformative for some learners. Watching students blossom from their initial intimidation by computational analysis into confident and competent data scientists is extremely rewarding.

Reading and writing in science

I have always been passionate about clear communication and compelling scientific story-telling. As a Master’s student at Arizona State University, I helped run the undergraduate course for the Embryo Project, a writers’ workshop-styled seminar in which students developed a cluster of articles for an online encyclopedia of embryo research. Prior to my PhD, I was employed as an adjunct instructor at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. In the 2011-2012 school year, I taught a lecture course with two lab sections called “Core Science.” Similar to Foundations of Biology, Core Science was designed as a science requirement for non-majors. I taught this course as a writing-intensive survey of important episodes in the history of science and current events. As a PhD student, I was recruited to teach two semesters of the add-on writing component (W-Section) of the undergraduate evolutionary biology course. For the W-Section, students wrote and revised a literature review of a topic of their interest; for many of them, this paper became the foundation of their honors’ theses.