Individuality is a fundamental feature of animal behavior and represents a potent substrate that evolutionary pressures can act upon. Such idiosyncrasy in behavior exists across scales: within a single animal from moment-to-moment, across animals responding to an identical stimulus, or in response to complex and changing environments. Individuality within insect behavior is also important to understand within the context of global health.

Using an algorithm incorporating high school GPA and SAT scores, we can predict a student’s GPA in biology at the end of SPU’s introductory undergraduate sequence. A disproportionate number of underrepresented students, however, are predicted to have lower grades. This finding instigated the development of the BioCORE Scholars Program in 2015. Its interventions include study cohorts, peer mentors, community role models, and research participation.

For many students, stepping into an undergraduate science classroom can be intimidating. Students face many barriers to success, including weaknesses in their educational backgrounds, mental and physical health issues, and outside demands on their time. As faculty, we walk beside our students through these challenges and work to inspire them to feel invested in their learning. In this talk, I will describe several strategies that I have used to create engaging classroom environments.

In the era of standardized testing, it is all too easy to lose the curiosity and love of learning that drove us as young learners, and switch to an extrinsic motivation mindset, learning just enough to get the desired grade. I hypothesize that by designing assignments and modules which value creativity and curiosity, and have the right balance of challenge, autonomy, purpose, and community building, we can help our students rekindle their intrinsic motivation and love of science and guide them into becoming lifelong learners.

As scientists, we find motivating questions, we collaborate with colleagues, and we engage with peer-reviewed studies to guide our research. As teachers, we should do the same to guide our teaching. In this talk, I'll explain (a) what my teaching goals are, (b) how my practice is guided by pedagogical studies, (c) how I contribute to pedagogical research, and (d) future goals for undergraduate education at UW Biology.

Our intestinal microbial community is quickly evolving with us, following changes to modern lifestyles and even throughout our lifetimes. I aim to understand how horizontal gene transfer shapes interactions in the microbiota and the implications of this pervasive phenomenon for community properties relevant to human health (e.g. resilience of a healthy microbiota to perturbations). I identified a large conjugative plasmid that frequently transfers to multiple species within a person and mediates the formation of multi-species biofilms.

Mammals maintain stable body temperature largely independent of the temperature of their environment and even small deviations from optimal internal temperature can threaten their survival. Thermoregulation critically depends on the ability to sense deep body temperature by the intrinsically warm and cold-sensitive neurons in the preoptic area of the hypothalamus (POA). However, the precise physiological roles of the temperature-sensitive POA neurons and the molecular mechanisms responsible for their temperature sensitivity are poorly understood.