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.

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.

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.

With the introduction of active learning, STEM undergraduate classrooms are becoming more social environments. However, the dynamics between students and its impact on student learning are vastly underexplored. My research utilizes portable and wearable brain technologies, such as portable electroencephalography (EEG), to investigate how students interact with one another in biology classrooms.

Laboratory courses provide a unique opportunity to introduce students to what it means to “do science.” Laboratory course activities, however, are often misaligned with authentic scientific thinking and practices. Designing curricula that engage students in authentic scientific practices is challenging, particularly when per-student resources are limited, such as at large public universities. To meet this challenge, we have developed, taught and assessed a model-based inquiry laboratory curriculum, Authentic Inquiry through Modeling in Biology (AIM-Bio).