Professional Organizations

  • AAAS. 01/01/2018 - 12/31/2018. Position : Member.
  • American Association of Plant Biologists. 01/10/1990 - present. Position : Member.

Teaching Philosophy

My philosophy is that by teaching students how science is done, they then learn to think about science, and they understand how scientific progresses is achieved.  I put this philosophy into effect by focusing my plant developmental biology teaching on only three major topics, and covering each topic in depth.  Each topic module consists of one introductory lecture, and then straight to the primary literature.  I select a suite of papers that follows the progression of one research topic.  To empower the students to read these primary literature articles, I prepare and stream webcasts that provide the necessary background, and then focus their efforts for discussion of specific topics.  Each class meeting is not a lecture, but instead a classroom discussion, focused on the questions raised in the webcast.  Through this approach, the students learn that science is an on-going activity, they learn that data must be interpreted (and how to interpret it), and they learn that discoveries can cause previous interpretations to change. 

Teaching Projects

  • Redesigning the Biology Freshman Experience: Development of a new Introductory Biology Series. Project Lead: Leslie Sieburth. Collaborators: James Ehleringer, David Carrier, Neil Vickers, Naina Phadnis, Julie Hollien, William Brazelton, Sarah Bush. College of Science 02/01/2017 - 01/31/2019.