For the next several semesters, I will only be teaching BIOL 310 - Biodiversity, which is a new core course for biology majors that I have developed with my colleague, Dr. Geoffrey Birchard. The goal of this course is to improve introductory organismal biology education by emphasizing 1) the universal principles governing the structure and function of all organisms across the Tree of Life and 2) inquiry-based laboratories using a variety of model organisms.

The curriculum design was assisted, in part, by a GMU College of Science Curricular & Pedagogical Innovation award for my proposal, “Biodiversity science for the 21st century.” Inspiration for the scope of the course derives from Michael Benton's The History of Life: a very short introduction (2008, Oxford University Press) and Bio2010: transforming undergraduate education for future research biologists (2003, NRC), among many other published works.

The following list includes the majority of the courses I have led over the last five years:

BIOL 310, Biodiversity
BIOL 344, Plant Diversity and Evolution
BIOL 345, Plant Ecology
BIOL 495, Assessing Virginia's Plant Biodiversity (directed study)*
BIOL 520, Systematics of Complex Angiosperm Families
EVPP 335, People, Plants and Culture
*see product of BIOL 495 student research! (pdf), a poster presented at the 2008 NCSE conference, Washington DC.

[All course material is located on GMU's Blackboard site]