Teaching

Lecture Notes

I am in the processes of adding lecture notes on various topics in ecology and evolutionary biology. I hope you find them helpful!

Notes:

Teaching Philosophy

Just as a microscope can reveal the inner-workings of a cell, mathematics can illuminate the processes that shape ecological communities and evolutionary adaptation. Unfortunately, biology students are not often exposed to this perspective in a nurturing way that cultivates curiosity or inspires the development of quantitative skills. Instead, many students view mathematics as intimidating and irrelevant to their interests as life science majors. I aim to dispel these notions, which are especially problematic due to the increasing quantitative demands within the biological sciences.

As an educator, my broad learning objectives are to:

  1. Guide students to understand the profound usefulness of modeling in biology, emphasizing the role modeling plays within the scientific method
  2. Facilitate an environment in which students build quantitative (mathematical, statistical, and programming) skills necessary for understanding/producing published research, using data-based biological examples as motivation
  3. Convince students that modeling is a fun, creative, and rewarding process using active learning methods and research opportunities

After embracing mathematics / quantitative reasoning our ally, the world becomes our oyster and there is endless room for creativity. As a concrete example, here’s an animation that depicts the population dynamics of many tree species in a forest, based on a paper by Wiegand et al (2025):

Animation of the tree community model. Trees produce and disperse seeds seeds (see the yellow lines). After dispersing seeds, some adults die. The probability a tree dies increases with the number of trees near it. After tree death, the dispersed seeds grow into new adults.

Animation of the tree community model. Trees produce and disperse seeds seeds (see the yellow lines). After dispersing seeds, some adults die. The probability a tree dies increases with the number of trees near it. After tree death, the dispersed seeds grow into new adults.

I’m personally fascinated by the insights models (such as the above) can provide into the natural world. I also simply find then fun and amusing to think about. It is my hope that you will find them entertaining and illminating as well.