Me and some wonderful 4th grade students in Tucson, AZ, circa 2014. I was a fellow in an NSF training program to increase communication skills for graduate students in STEM fields. As part of this program, I spent 20 hours a week in a 4th grade classroom, teaching math and science to these students. I learned just as much about effective--and ineffective--teaching methods from them as they learned STEM from me!
Instructor
Biostatistics (Spring 2023)
Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease (Spring 2024)
Teaching Assistant
Evolutionary Biology (Univ Arizona)
Ecology (Univ Arizona)
Marine Discovery (Univ Arizona)
Marine Biology (Univ Arizona)
General Biology (Florida State Univ)
Guest Lectures
Species coexistence. Graduate Course: Seminar in Biodiversity Theory
Competition. Graduate Course: Community Ecology
The role of temporal environmental variation in community dynamics. Graduate Course: Spatio-Temporal Ecology
Hypothesis testing, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian inference. Graduate Seminar: Statistics
Bootstrapping, permutation, and randomization. Graduate Seminar: Statistics
I see great value in quantitative thinking in all aspects of life. In my teaching, I try to illustrate to students how impactful quantitative thinking can be for solving problems.
In ecology, quantitative thinking is so valuable because systems are extremely dynamic. Understanding the interactions and linkages between individuals and species is necessary, but insufficient, to predict ecological processes. A further step is needed to make projections about interactions as systems change, which requires quantitative thinking.
Dynamism is common in many biological systems, making the principles of quantitative thinking robust to many sciences.
But learning quantitative tools can often be very difficult and challenging for students -- I know from personal experience! To put in the effort to overcome these challenges, students have to see the fruits of their labor. That is to say, they have to have some reason to be engaged with the material. This is why I try to motivate all my teaching with questions and problems that are relevant to the students and that cannot be solved without quantitative analysis. With an answer, the reward is made clear.
For example, many students taking biology courses are interested in issues related to public health and medicine. Ecology and evolutionary biology may seem at first sight to be pretty removed from these issues, but upon closer inspection, there is a great deal that ecology and evolutionary biology can contribute to problems in human health.
As one example, one can recognize that hosts are "patches" of suitable habitat for pathogens, and transmission dynamics act much like a network of spatially patchy populations. Alternatively, one can look at dynamics within a single host. A dynamical systems perspective helps reveal that the latency period of HIV positive individuals before the onset of AIDS is a long-transient before the immune system is overwhelmed by HIV. Such a perspective is critical to understanding the efficacy of current treatment regimes. Similarly, the dynamics of co-infection of different pathogen strains can be recast as a problem of multiple competing species vying for host resources. As such, the field of species coexistence has a great many lessons that might be relevant to understanding the persistence and circulation of multiple pathogen strains.