Teaching

I consider teaching to be the most important part of my job, and I have chosen to pursue my career as a biologist at a primarily undergraduate institution for this reason.  My style of teaching is to present science as ongoing, evolving human endeavor, rather than as a collection of facts.  To that end, I emphasize not only the content of biology but also the context of scientific discoveries and people who made those discoveries.  For example, the "Van Dorn bottle" commonly used for water and plankton collections by aquatic biologists was originally developed by William Van Dorn to take samples of radioactive ocean water after underwater atomic tests.