Teaching

I have three primary teaching objectives. The first is to train students to be critical thinkers. The second is to define my role as a teacher and the role of students in the classroom. The third is to create variety in my teaching to reach an equally diverse student audience.

I have taught a diverse number of courses including General Biology, Biology for Non-Majors, Human Anatomy, Anatomy and Physiology, Vertebrate Zoology and Mammalogy.

For more information on my teaching philosophy, experience and a summary of my teaching evaluations, please see the following documents:

Philosophy

Experience

Teaching Evaluations

Mentoring

I find that students really enjoy geometric morphometric techniques because they not only quantify differences in shape, but they also create intuitive vizualizations of those differences. In the Summer of 2009, I mentored John Pamplin II, an undergradute student from Morehouse College under UCR's MSRIP (mentoring summer research internship program) (http://www.graduate.ucr.edu/APO/MSRIP.html). John worked with me on an independent research project examining potential differences in pelvic dimorphism in response to selection for voluntary wheel running. John presented these results at the MSRIP conference which concludes the program and at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students in Charlotte, N.C.

John Pamplin II (In the Morehouse shirt) working in the lab (Summer '09).