As Evergreen faculty, my aim is to stimulate logical, creative, and critical thinking in an atmosphere that is both scientifically rigorous and respectful. The scientific process is a main theme in my teaching, and I strive to bring it to the foreground of students' worldviews, so that they become comfortable generating hypotheses for the patterns that they observe around them in the world.
Areas of teaching interest and background: Evolutionary biology, animal behavior, tropical ecology, herpetology, vertebrate zoology, field biology, epistemology, writing, physical anthropology.
Contracts & Internships
- I will not be sponsoring contracts or internships during Fall quarter 2011.
Current Program (Fall & Winter 2011 - 2012)
- Equatorial Studies: Sound, Science, and the Western Imagination. With Eric Stein and Sean Williams.
Future (teaching) programs
- Nature's Prose, Spring 2012. A Core program with a focus on observation, honing good questions, and unitasking.
- Nature/Image: Science & Art (tentative title). Fall 2012, with Susan Aurand. All level.
- Vertebrate Evolution, Winter & Spring 2013. Upper-division.
Past programs
- Animal Behavior and Zoology 2.0. Fall, Winter & Spring, 2010-2011, with Bret Weinstein. This upper-division science program focused on the evolutionary ecology of animals in both temperate and tropical ecosystems.
- Development and Evolution: Form and Function through Time. Winter and Spring 2010, with Donald Morisato. An upper-division science program focusing on the diversity of form and function through the lenses of evolution and development.
- Genes to Ecosystems, Fall 2009, with Donald Morisato & Dylan Fischer. An upper-division science program.
- Animal Behavior & Zoology 1.0, an expanded year-long version of Animal Behavior, with an international field component in Panama.
- Vertebrate Evolution, Spring 2008.
- Evolving Communication, a sophomore - senior investigation into human and animal communication, with Susan Fiksdal, Fall & Winter 2007 - 2008.
- Animal Behavior, an upper-division science program, Spring 2007.
- The Extraordinary Science of Everyday Experience: A Day in the Life, a Core program, with Bret Weinstein, Winter 2007.
- Understanding Species, a Core (first year) program, co-taught with Jack Longino, Fall 2006.
- Population, Energy, & Resources (Masters in Environmental Studies (MES) core program), Winter 2006.
- Vertebrate Evolution, Fall 2005.
- Animal Behavior, Spring 2005.
- Forests through Time and Space: Introduction to Environmental Studies, with Paul Przybylowicz, FW 2004 - 2005.
- Fishes, Frogs and Forests, with Amy Cook, FW 2003 - 2004.
- Animal Behavior, Spring 2003.
- Freshwater Ecology, with Rob Cole, FW 2002 - 2003.
