Natural disaster accelerates age-associated immune dysregulation
By: Marina Watowich (Snyder-Mackler Lab)

Body size and paleolatitude in Lystrosaurus: Did Bergmann’s Rule apply during the Early Triassic?
By: Zoe Kulik (Sidor Lab)

What exactly is your machine learning? How to evaluate tree growth models
By: Stuart Graham (Hille Ris Lambers Lab)

Maize yield under a changing climate: impacts, mechanisms, and adaptation
By: Jennifer Hsiao (Swann Lab)

The analysis of quantitative data and its display in visual formats to explore patterns and communicate the findings of experiments and observational studies are essential practices in biology. However, creating effective and appropriate displays of data is a multi-faceted and reflective task. It requires knowledge of and reasoning with relevant concepts of the biological system under study, methodologies and measurements, mathematics/statistics, and visualizations.

Classroom practices affect student behavior, and by extension, their learning. Through studying how students discuss clicker questions in active learning classrooms, we have found that students rarely use reasoning when answering in-class questions. However, their use of reasoning increases when they are cued to use reasoning by instructors or peers, or when under pressure of accountability. Can students transfer in-class group practices to individual assessment opportunities that require reasoning and logic?

There is growing body of work from the learning sciences providing us with insights into how people learn; and from Discipline Based Education Research (DBER) we know what discipline-specific difficulties students face. However, it is quite surprising that relatively little of this understanding has made its way into the design of science and engineering curricula offered at most colleges and universities.

National calls to improve undergraduate STEM education have emphasized the importance of undergraduate research experiences. Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences, or CUREs, involve groups of students in addressing research problems or questions in the context of a class, and have been proposed as scalable ways of involving undergraduates in research.

My research program addresses two fundamental questions in evolutionary biology: how do the observable characteristics of organisms (e.g., morphology, behavior) evolve and adapt in response to ecological pressures? And, how does this evolutionary process facilitate or constrain the diversification of lineages? I largely focus on bats to answer these questions because, with over 1,400 ecologically and morphologically diverse species, they provide a natural experiment to investigate the sources of diversification.

As a lecturer, and now an Associate Teaching Professor, I have benefited from numerous mentors who inspired me, taught me new ways of teaching, and gave me opportunities to take on new challenges. In turn, I have mentored faculty members, post-doctoral fellows, graduate teaching assistants, peer facilitators and undergraduates. These interactions are not unidirectional. The feedback and collaborations from each of these groups has informed my teaching and thinking.