I have been fortunate to have many teaching experiences at numerous academic and government institutions over the last 15 years. Teaching and mentoring gives me an opportunity to share my excitement of science and discovery.

I put very strong emphasis on the development of communication skills. As a result, I stress both verbal and written communication in course exercises and my philosophy is to engage students.

I believe students seeking a career in science should be able to critically read research papers, communicate with clarity to a wide range of audiences, evaluate published scientific findings, and understand, analyze, and attempt to make sense of data. I believe strongly that universities have an important social responsibility to educate, train, and mentor students, so that – at the very least – our students will go on to be citizens capable of making informed decisions affecting society and life on the planet.

There are numerous aspects of teaching biology courses that I love. It’s easy for me to get excited about the amazing diversity of microbial life on this planet – and in the past few years I’ve also developed a similar enthusiasm for teaching plant based courses. I stress the importance of studying organisms in natural environments, so I make the students get outside and explore the natural world. I don’t forget to stress the importance of controlled experiments in the laboratory to exclude environmental factors from experiments and help foster critical observations. As a result, I expect students to spend time in the classroom, laboratory, and field and my exercises tend to focus on visual observations.

The laboratory and field component of my course is vital to the learning experience. I require students to see first hand using microscopes and I expect students to understand and use dichotomous keys. Students observe organisms in the field and attempt to culture using isolating media and aseptic technique.

I've developed the scaffold of a "Fermentation" course with a focus on food microbiology which stems from courses I have taught -- I think students would be really excited about this course and I'm excited to teach it!

I’ve recently taught a very successful course at the upper undergraduate/graduate level on the use of bioinformatics tools for genomic data analysis. The students who were in the course took a lot away from it – which makes me very excited. Along with the help of some great recent books, such as Haddock & Dunn’s Practical Computing for Biologists, I developed this course around bioinformatics concepts – dealing with sequence data, nucleotide and protein analysis using programming languages such as Python, Perl, and R, managing data in a open-source databases, and visualizing genomic data. Much of this course was based on my own expriences with Titus Brown's great summer next-generation sequencing data analysis bootcamp.

What I am hoping to do with future versions of this course is to have each student extract DNA from a microbial organism (Bacteria, Archaea, or Microbial Eukaryotes with smaller genomes from the Fungi and Protists) and work through the exercises in the course with the end goal of submitting a genome announcement paper with information on their organism. I like to connect teaching with research and believe this course is a great way to do so.

See more about my teaching experiences in computation with Software Carpentry / Data Carpentry on my outreach page.

Check out my Github page for my teaching materials.

This last year, along with two incredible co-instructors Ashley Shade and Tracy Teal - and a whole bunch of fantastic guest lecturers - I was one of the instructors for the very successful EDAMAME (Explorations in Data Analyses for Metagenomic Advances in Microbial Ecology) short course held at Kellogg Biological Station through Michigan State University. All the course materials are available through our schedule and tutorials pages. A great time was had by all. We’re planning on having the course this next year, so check the EDAMAME website for more information.