Three students surveying plants along a transect line
Plant Ecology: plant community surveys at Cherry Valley Wildlife Refuge
My goal in teaching and mentoring is to help students to develop as scientists and giving them the skills they need to continue learning independently.

Lab courses are developed around real research experiences in local parks and preserves; each semester contributes to long-term research projects such as monitoring forest structure at Stony Acres and documenting vegetation change in restored golf courses. 

​My courses emphasize critical thinking, scientific writing, and quantitative/analytical skills. I introduce students to primary literature, current research, and relevant current events, so they can see how scientists use the concepts they are learning in class. 
Courses Taught
Current courses taught
BIOL 200 | General Ecology (lecture and lab) | Fall and Spring
BIOL 423/523 | Plant Ecology (lecture and lab) | Fall
BIOL 428/528 | Biogeography | Spring
BIOL 495 | Seminar I | Fall and Spring
BIOL 583 | Research Design and Data Analysis for Biologists | Spring
​
Additional courses taught
BIOL 115 | Introductory Biology II Lab
BIOL 220 | Field Botany (lecture and lab) | Spring
​BIOL 496 | Seminar II | Spring 

Independent studies, research, and internships
BIOL 485 | Independent Study (undergraduate)
BIOL 486 | Field Experience and Internship (undergraduate)
BIOL 494 | Research in Biology
BIOL 572/573 | Thesis I and II
BIOL 586 | Field Experience and Internship (graduate)
BIOL 577 | Independent Study (graduate)
white mesh bags containing leaf litter, staked to the ground for a decomposition study
Plant Ecology: leaf decomposition experiment at Stony Acres
students measuring the length of a stand of Japanese knotweed along a rocky riverbank
Surveying plant communities along Brodhead Creek, ForEvergreen Nature Preserve
students examining leaves on a tree
Assessing herbivory on native and invasive plants in Cherry Valley Wildlife Refuge
groups of students standing in the woods among trees labelled with flagging tape, measuring tree diameter. A grid is marked out on the ground with measuring tapes to outline the plot.
Establishing an EREN PFPP forest plot at Stony Acres
Plant Ecology
 As a plant ecologist, one of my primary motivations in teaching is to help students gain awareness and appreciation of the plants that surround them. I aim to help students become more aware of plants as compelling, dynamic living organisms, rather than just a green backdrop to the rest of our lives.

Plant Ecology places the study of the form and function of plants in the context of their ecological interactions. This course incorporates class discussions, laboratory and field field observations, and original research projects carried out by the class. Students learn plant identification skills and methods of ecological research and vegetation analysis through hands-on practice in the classroom and outdoors.
Course Description
This course is designed to instill knowledge of the principles of fundamentals of plant ecology and the methods of vegetation analysis.
Learning Objectives
  1. Students will understand the history of land plants through time and how the evolution of land plants relates to their interactions with the environment.
  2. Students will learn how to describe and classify plant species and communities.
  3. Students will learn and apply methods of vegetation analysis, including field surveys, methods of calculating species diversity, and statistical analysis.
  4. Students will learn how plants have adapted to cope with various environments, and how these adaptations relate to their diversity.
  5. Students will learn how plants interact with other organisms and with their environment.
  6. Students will be able to identify plant species using dichotomous keys, and will learn the vocabulary of plant description used in these keys.
  7. Students will learn how to search for, organize, synthesize, evaluate and communicate scientific evidence from the primary literature.

Field Botany​

Field Botany trains students in the identification and classification of plant species. The course includes the use and preparation of dichotomous keys, the basics of plant systematics, and training in skills needed to identify local plant species. Students work in the field and with specimens in the Franklin B. Buser Herbarium, and learn to prepare specimens for the herbarium collection.

Course Description

This course includes field studies in identification and classification of native and cultivated plants of the area and special instruction in the use and preparation of keys to the identification of herbs, shrubs, trees, ferns, bryophytes, and algae. Phylogenetic and taxonomic relationships of the plant groups will be explored.

Learning Objectives

This is an intermediate-level course on the classification, identification, and ecology of local plants. Topics include:
  • Plant structure and classification
  • Plant characteristics used in identification
  • Identification of common local plant families and species
  • Local plant communities and their characteristic floras
At the end of the course, students should:
  • Have a basic understanding of local plants and their natural history and ecology
  • Know basic techniques needed to identify plants
  • Be able to recognize many common local plants
students looking at field guides while standing next to a small tree with thorns on the trunkPicture
Practicing winter woody plant identification at Stony Acres
a pressed and dried Aquilegia, wit several flowers, mounted on herbarium paper
Student herbarium specimen collected for Field Botany
A taxidermied mouse with label tag and a computer monitor with RStudio on screen
Natural history + data science
Research Design and Data Analysis
Research Design and Data Analysis is a graduate-level course in experimental design and statistical analysis, focused on the statistical programming language R. The course covers complex experimental designs, the appropriate statistical models to analyze those designs, and the implementation of those models in R. Students become familiar with managing, plotting, and analyzing their data in R and the RStudio IDE and managing shared coding projects via GitHub. 
Course Description
This course covers methods of experimental design and analysis in biological research, with special emphasis on common experimental design issues and sampling methods encountered in laboratory and field studies. The course also introduces modern computing techniques for data management and statistical analysis in biology. ​
Learning Objectives
After completion of the course, students should be able to:
  1. design observational and experimental lab and field studies in biology, and analyze the results of those studies using R statistical software
  2. recognize common errors in statistical analyses in biology (e.g., pseudoreplication), and understand how to design experiments and analyses to avoid these pitfalls
  3. build complex ANOVA/linear models to accommodate complex spatial/temporal structure in biological data
  4. conduct multivariate and non-parametric statistical tests commonly used in biological research
Biogeography
Biogeography combines the study of evolution with the study of spatial patterns in ecology and evolution, to better understand the geographical distribution of organisms and the underlying causes of those distributions. This course covers the evolutionary and geological underpinnings of species distributions, as well as processes that change those distributions. This course is offered to both graduate and undergraduate students. Graduate students use the R-based ecological modelling platform Wallace to complete a species distribution modelling project to explore the transportation and spread of an invasive species of their choosing.
polar bear and penguin together on an iceberg
What's the biogeography of this image? (Peter Fischer)
Course Description
This course deals with the geographical distribution of organisms. It examines the pattern of these distributions and the underlying causes for them. The question of what present distributions of organisms indicate about past climates and environments is considered. A secondary area of examination is ecology of invasions which include present day translocation of organisms from former to new habitats. ​
Learning Objectives
  • Students will be able to recognize global patterns of the distribution of species and explain the ecological, evolutionary, and geographical causes of those patterns.
  • Students will be able to define an invasive species and describe the ecological and anthropogenic causes and effects of biological invasions.
  • Students will be able to summarize and critique information from peer-reviewed primary literature.
  • Students will be able to apply principles of biogeography and synthesize published primary research to explain case studies in applied disciplines such as disease ecology and global change biology.
  • Students will be able to use software tools for species distribution modeling to produce a basic distribution map of an invasive species and describe the process of invasion by comparing the historic and novel range of the species.
General Ecology students conducting a study on forest structure
Commonly observed species in the class iNaturalist project

General Ecology

General Ecology is a 200-level course required for biology majors, providing an overview of the fundamental principles of ecology, as well as training students in aspects of data collection, analysis, and scientific writing that serves as a foundation for upper-level biology courses. Students gain experience in field biology, computer simulations, basic statistics, and the drafting and revision of a formal scientific paper. 

Course Description

This course is a study of interrelationships of plants and animals and their environments; the influences of heat, light, air, soil, water, and biotic factors; associations and successions; habitat types; populations, equilibrium, and predator-prey relationships.

Learning Objectives

  • Students will be able to apply fundamental ecological principles to make predictions and test hypotheses about processes in various ecological systems.
  • Students will be able to organize, analyze, and present data in the form of a scientific lab report.
  • Students will be able to support research findings by searching for, organizing, synthesizing, evaluating and communicating in writing scientific evidence from the primary literature.