Education & Outreach

Teaching

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I've had the great pleasure to teach a range of courses during my time in graduate school. My first experience with teaching was during undergrad, where I tutored organic chemistry. While at Texas A&M, I was the teaching assistant for a range of labs, including Introductory and Honors Biology, Invertebrate Zoology, Marine Biology, and Human Anatomy & Physiology. 

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For the Invertebrate Zoology lab, I was responsible for updating the taxonomic records in the lab manual, which resulted in yearly reworks of the course material. I also contributed to the Biodiversity Collections at Texas A&M by collecting specimens specifically for this course from the Texas coastline. 

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In the summer of 2019, I was hired by the department to completely redesign the Honors Biology lab curriculum. To do this, I wrote a new lab manual for the course, including novel curriculum and experiments that introduced the students to a range of topics, including how to use bioinformatic pipelines, the statistical analysis of biological data using various programming languages, and field techniques in ecological studies, including how to design their own experiments. 

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As the teaching assistant in Marine Biology, I was also a guest lecturer on several occasions, providing lessons on Beach Ecology and Coral Reef Ecosystems. I also led a field trip to the Texas coast each year as part of my duties as teaching assistant for Marine Biology, and this included in-the-field demonstrations of sampling techniques in salt marshes, rocky intertidal zones, and beaches. We also led the students into the bay on a small research vessel to demonstrate how to collect organisms using trawls, plankton nets, and benthic grabs. 

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Outreach

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My scientific outreach began in undergrad, where I presented at a public symposium on climate change. I also contributed to a campus-wide essay contest on pressing issues in ecology, writing on the topic of habitat fragmentation. 

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In graduate school, I joined the Darwin Day Committee, which was involved in organizing an annual event in February celebrating the evolutionary biology. The event was open to the public, and attracted hundreds of people. I also volunteered at a local elementary school in Bryan, TX to represent the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (EEB) program, in which I set-up a booth with organisms from each of the major phyla of life and talked with both children and their parents about the science of evolutionary biology. It was my experience in these schools that first sparked my interest in how pseudoscientific ideas like creationism were alarmingly common among the general public. 

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, I began searching for a remote option for public outreach, and so I started a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo-q9k9ZzD_qhxGU-8jAC-A) dedicated to science education. I present a range of topics in the philosophy and history of science, and in evolutionary biology in a way that the general public can understand. I have also hosted my colleagues, providing them a platform to discuss their science, and have used it to discuss sensitive topics such as gender-affirming care and the biology of sex. 

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Debunking Pseudoscience

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As alluded to above, I was introduced to the prevalence of pseudoscientific ideas like creationism during my public outreach at local schools. I had a series of awkward and at times heated interactions with parents, and led me to begin researching how prevalent these views were among the general public. As of 2021, almost 50% of the US population reject evolution (Miller et al. 2022). These ideas thrive in online spaces, and there are creationist organizations, such as Answer in Genesis (AiG), with >500k subscribers. 

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As an evolutionary biologist in a world in which school boards are almost weekly putting forward legislation to sneak-in pseudoscientific ideas like intelligent design into public school curriculum, I feel it's my duty to both educate the public on evolution as well as to directly attack these agencies promoting this nonsense. 

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In addition to my science education videos on YouTube, I also generate videos addressing the most common creationist talking-points, revealing how vacuous they really are. I believe scientists have for too long ignored these people as cranks, while failing to recognize that the very funding structures we rely upon are contingent on the voting population's support. If almost half of the population reject evolution, it is in the best interest of science and the continuation of our research to deal with these ideas head-on.