Mentoring
Promoting young people in STEM
I have been fortunate to have some really wonderful female mentors including an undergraduate professor at Kenyon College, Dr. Siobhan Fennessy and a supervisor, Dr. Haldre Rogers. As a result, a growing passion of mine is mentoring and encouraging other women in science. At Wake Forest University, I mentored an undergraduate student in studying how we can use social media to inform conservation in a declining species. Additionally, I mentored three undergraduate students in researching sleep in Nazca boobies. When mentoring students, we met weekly to discuss scientific papers and worked together to develop scientific questions, testable hypotheses, and statistical analyses.
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Leading an all-lady crew on Seal Island NWR
Outreach
Recent outreach in the community
With my Bio 101 students at Wake Forest University, I assisted with Dr. Gloria Muday’s genetics outreach project at local middle schools throughout Winston-Salem, NC. We taught lesson plans on plant traits, Mendelian genetics, and genetic modification. I have also been a Guest Lecturer in a Women in Science class at Pfeiffer University, talking to students about possible careers in biology and sharing my research on foraging behavior in Nazca boobies.
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Lecturing at Pfeiffer University
Teaching
Working with undergraduate students
As a graduate student, I had teaching opportunities in several forms. I helped teach Behavioral Ecology at the University of Michigan Biological Station, where I guided students in independent research testing if ant lion behavior has a circadian rhythm. At Wake Forest University, I taught the Bio 114: Comparative Physiology Lab and the Bio 101: Biology and the Human Condition Lab to primarily freshmen and sophomores. I taught Bio 101 for four semesters, with the unique experience of helping the lab evolve from a course focused on teaching non-Biology-major students how to do science to one centered on teaching students how to think critically about scientific concepts. I was awarded the Graduate Student Outstanding Teaching Award in May 2021 for my lesson development and teaching.
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Teaching genetics at local middle-schools