Teaching and Mentorship

My goals as an instructor are to help students master material and facilitate their development as independent, critical, and creative thinkers. To do this, I focus on three steps during the education process: 1) engaging students through active participation and dynamic presentation, 2) assessing the efficacy of my teaching and mentoring via formal and informal assessment techniques, and 3) modifying my teaching and mentoring to fit my students’ needs.

FORMAL INSTRUCTION

I have taught multiple undergraduate and graduate level courses. At UC Santa Barbara I was the lecturer on record for Vertebrate Ecology and Evolution, and at the University of Illinois I served as the instructor for Ornithology. I have co-taught a graduate seminar, "Readings in Avian Biology", for two semesters with Jeff Brawn at the University of Illinois. I am also currently serving on the committees of two Master's students, Emilie Ospina and Kaity Ripple.

CONSERVATION PHYSIOLOGY INTERNSHIP

In summer 2015 I developed and was the instructor for a summer internship in avian conservation physiology for UIUC Veterinary Medicine students. This course gave veterinary students hands-on field experience and provided them with an ecological context for their work on wildlife populations. Students were trained in nest-searching, banding and bleeding birds, as well as performing physiology work like running bactericidal capacity assays, measuring hematocrit and white blood cell counts, and using fecal flotation to detect helminth and coccidian infections.

MENTORSHIP

I feel very fortunate to have spent a good portion of my career working with undergraduate and graduate students in a mentoring capacity. I have mentored over 30 students and these endeavors have been enormously rewarding for me on multiple levels. I hope to continue in a mentoring capacity in my current position as a postdoc, and in the future. Many of my former mentees have pursued careers in the sciences, and I've included some examples below.

SCHOOL FOR SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT

As a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, I was involved in an NSF-funded educational outreach program called The School for Scientific Thought (SST), which is a program designed to train graduate students in pedagogical development, specifically with a focus on integrating traditional teaching with hands-on learning. The SST course I designed and taught was called Field Biology for the Future, in which I combined conceptual material on avian natural history, life-history theory, sexual selection, and ecological physiology with field and lab exercises. The students responded enthusiastically to the course, and I enjoyed the experience so much I became a coordinator for the program.