Teaching & Mentorship
I am committed to excellent, holistic teaching and mentorship of undergraduates. As an educator, I deeply value connection and experiential learning, and I strive to inspire students through innovative contexts. I find field-based, design-oriented, and research-focused settings are particularly rewarding contexts in which to mentor undergraduates. It is a humbling, uplifting process to help students explore their passions and hone their abilities as increasingly independent researchers in their own right.
Pictured (L to R): Wendy Ooi, Kate Montana, Jordan Bloem, and me at our final research debrief!
Courses taught at Trinity College as an Instructor or Co-Instructor of Record
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ENVS 375: Methods in Environmental Science [Fall 2021]
This course introduces students to the scientific process. Working in teams, students design and carry out field research. They then learn to follow lab protocols, use lab equipment, analyze their data, write their findings as a scientific paper, and present their results in an oral presentation.
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ENVS 216: U.S. Political Partisanship and Climate Policy [Spring 2022, Spring 2023]
This interactive class will explore the history of the environmental movement in the United States, including major policy milestones of the 20th century. Students will then apply this knowledge-along with insights from media and literature-to understand and ideate bipartisan solutions to climate policy.
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ENVS 121: Human Dimensions of Wildlife [Fall 2022]
This course will explore historical as well as contemporary human dimensions of wildlife use and management, including stakeholder engagement, hunting regulation, predator reintroductions, Indigenous knowledge, and international policy agreements.
Examples of Student Mentee Research
Paulina Rivera
Paulina is working on the Hartford Parks Project. This project aims to understand the benefits and accessibility of Hartford public parks to park users across the city. Paulina translated our survey into Spanish, and she is helping carry out interviews in Spanish and English.
Josh Brown
Josh looked at the role of wildfire management in Yosemite and Sequoia & Kings Canyon national parks. For this integrative research experience, Josh investigated prescribed burns and smoke damage, among other issues, to better understand California fire management.
Kayleigh Moses
Kayleigh completed a senior thesis, co-advised by Shafqat Hussain in Anthropology, on shifting public attitudes toward Eastern coyotes in the Northeast U.S. Kayleigh used contemporary interviews and newspaper archives to consider social constructions of the species and implications for human-wildlife coexistence.
Courses taught at UC Berkeley as Graduate Student Instructor
ESPM C107: Biology and Geomorphology of Tropical Islands
We spent 9 weeks at the UC Berkeley Gump Field Station in Mo’orea, French Polynesia, where we advised students on their own biology and ecology research projects in coral reef, tropical forest, and beach habitats!
ESPM 137: Landscape Ecology
We helped students through R scripts that allowed them to carry out powerful analyses on landscape ecology topics such as climate change, deforestation, connectivity, and landscape genetics.
ESPM 114: Wildlife Ecology
Students learned about topics such as endangered species recovery, predation, and climate change effects on wildlife, and we helped them estimate the size of a wildlife population for a species of their choice.