Teaching is a balance between providing the necessary “mere facts” and promoting the all-important critical thinking: what do the “mere facts” mean? Guiding and advising graduate students and postdoctoral scholars is not so different than teaching in the classroom. I point them to information they need to learn, of course. More importantly, I guide them to think critically about what I've given them. Most importantly, I argue to them that if our goal is to understand how the world works, that understanding is actually a set of ideas about how all that we know fits together. Good research, while grounded in this learned material is focused on those ideas and whether we are fitting all of the information together in the right way. To see more of Dr. Joe Travis' teaching and mentorship mentality see here.
Teaching and Mentorship
PCB 4674 - Evolution
Fall Semseter
Evolution, the process of descent with modification, is the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life and the history of that diversity. There are two fundamental tenets to this explanation. First, diverse species are related to one another through their separate descent from a common ancestor. Some common ancestors are recent, others distant. This means that the diversity of living things that we have cataloged has evolved, ultimately, from one or a few common ancestors. Second, the most plausible mechanism for these evolutionary trajectories is the action of Darwinian selection on genetic variation within and among populations. We will use reading (yours), lectures (mine), and a variety of assignments to understand the empirical foundation of these tenets and how scientists integrate them into the modern theory of evolution. For more information you can look at syllabus above or see a proposed schedule here.
PCB 5425 - Population Ecology
Fall Semester
Population ecology is focused on understanding the factors that affect the dynamics of where populations are found (distribution) and the numbers of individuals in those populations (abundance). As such, it embraces topics from the seemingly mundane (detection probabilities) to the profound (complex numerical dynamics and extinction probabilities). The goal of this course is to make students familiar with the range of topics that comprise modern population ecology, knowledgeable about the fundamentals of population ecology, and aware of some of the more important applications of the concepts and methods of population ecology to problems like sustainable harvesting, the spread of invasives, and probabilities of establishment and extinction. For more information you can look at syllabus above or see a proposed schedule here.
DIS & Other Opportunities
DIS allows students to work in a faculty member's lab, participating in their research. If you want to do a DIS you must first find a faculty member with whom to work. Some faculty list DIS opportunities on the website (http://www.bio.fsu.edu/undergrad/researchops.php) but most students find a faculty DIS sponsor by reading about what individual faculty are working on and then approaching individual faculty. DIS research is not limited to Biological Science faculty, you can work with faculty in other departments.
To be eligible to participate in a DIS or Research Methods course, students must have:
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Junior or senior standing as a Biological Science
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A minimum 3.0 biology GPA in all biological science, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and statistics courses that apply to the major