About
Teaching Professor at UMBC; leads workshops in evidence-based teaching, motivating students, Team-Based Learning, and other topics; interested in best practices for training students to think quantitatively.Research interests
I'm interested in seeing an increase in the use of quantitative thinking generally, and mathematical modeling specifically, in undergraduate biology education, particularly in lower-division courses where such methods are rarely employed, and am involved in several projects relating to that. I am also involved in an evaluation of student discourse within teams in the context of Team-Based Learning and other flipped classroom pedagogies, and in the use of collaborative learning in general. For more on research, please see my professional site.Teaching interests
I teach Human Physiology, Comparative Animal Physiology, physiology lab, Medical Case Studies, and sometimes other courses. Every spring, I teach a seminar in the Honors College. This year’s seminar is an exploration of nature-brain interactions. I'm interested in improving STEM education practices locally, nationally and internationally, and conduct training/workshops on a variety of topics in evidence-based teaching. I'm a certified trainer/consultant in a teaching strategy called "Team-Based Learning" that incorporates a lot of best practices; it's a type of flipped-classroom strategy in which students prepare with basic content knowledge outside of class, and then after assuring that they are truly prepared, they work though increasingly complex application problems, in permanent teams, during class time.Education
- Postdoc, Reproductive Endocrinology — Harvard Medical School (2002)
- Ph D, Neurobiology and Physiology — Northwestern University (1998)
- BA, Neuroscience — Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio (1993)