Teaching
Instructional Faculty III, Department of Biology, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Whether the course is a general-education class or a 600-level one, a few common threads run through my teaching. I believe understanding how science works, rather than seeing it as a series of facts to be memorized, is a key to scientific and critical thinking. I want students to be able to evaluate scientific claims for their evidence and potential bias, not just to repeat them. My Biology in Popular Media course turns those skills on movies, television, and documentaries. Since the past is the key to the present, evolution and phylogeny are organizing frameworks in several of my courses. Anatomy and physiology make more sense once you see them as the products of historical processes as well as modern ones. I also believe science students should learn to access the scientific literature themselves, so in my upper-level courses we regularly read primary literature, building from a first look at scientific articles in Biology of the Dinosaurs to weekly papers in Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates, and student-led, seminar-style discussion in Comparative & Evolutionary Physiology.
In the lab, I teach anatomy like a language: a vocabulary built through daily practice, and then put to work in discussing form and function, with real specimens and dissection at the center. The physiology capstone lab goes a step further, with students designing and running their own experiments and presenting their results as researchers do. Whether you take one of my courses or several, I hope all students emerge with a clearer idea of what science is, and how it works.
Open to all students
No prerequisites; they count toward the biological science breadth requirement.
- ZOO 110
Biology in Popular Media: Fact or Fiction?
Introductory biology, and science as a process, taught through movies, television, and documentaries: how biology and biologists are portrayed, which common tropes hold up, and how those depictions shape the public's understanding of science.
- ZOO 260
Introductory Ecology
The fundamental concepts of ecology: how organisms interact with each other and with their environment, with an emphasis on current environmental issues and on evolution as the driver of the biological diversity around us.
- ZOO 275
Biology of the Dinosaurs
The biology, ecology, and evolution of dinosaurs. We examine how dinosaurs lived and their major evolutionary transitions, from predator–prey interactions to the origin of flight. We also look at how they died, and how Mesozoic ecology gave rise to modern ecosystems.
An honors option (fall) adds a research paper and a student-led discussion.
Advanced courses for majors
Building on introductory zoology.
- ZOO 430
Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates
The vertebrate body, system by system, and how it varies, approached through function, embryology, and evolution. Lectures are paired with a dissection lab working through representative vertebrates.
- ZOO 611
Comparative & Evolutionary Physiology
General physiological principles, compared across lineages with very different evolutionary histories and ecologies: adaptation to salinity, temperature, altitude, pressure, and pollution, and how nervous and endocrine systems evolved to support those adaptations. Includes weekly journal articles and seminar-style, student-led discussion.
- ZOO 612
Comparative & Evolutionary Physiology Lab
An optional research capstone, usually taken by seniors. Working in groups, students investigate physiological adaptations in invertebrate animals by designing and running their own experiments, analyzing the data in R, and presenting the results in a research paper and an oral presentation.
Teaching projects
- 2024–25 UW–Madison Instructional Laboratory Modernization grant, to modernize the teaching labs in Noland 315 and 321
- 2021 “A clarification of rabbit shoulder musculature for teaching functional anatomy,” with Jacki Whisenant and Aaron Kufner, Experimental Biology 2021
- 2020–21 UW–Madison Instructional Laboratory Modernization grant, for the ZOO 430/612 lab in Noland 321
Recognition
- 2017 L&S Teaching Fellow, College of Letters & Science, UW–Madison
- 2015 Communication-B Teaching Assistant Fellow, UW–Madison