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.
Submitted by Sujay-Balebail on
Urban ecosystems are intrinsically heterogenous, characterized by dynamic biotic and abiotic interactions that are not witnessed in non-urban environments. Urban flora and fauna experience a suite of novel disturbances and stressors that have led to remarkable phenotypic strategies and adaptations to cope with urban living. Despite recent groundbreaking discoveries and innovation in the fields of urban ecology and evolution, the drivers of urban heterogeneity that induce biological change are seldom articulated.
