TEACHING
ENVIRONMENTAL METABARCODING: AN INTRODUCTION TO HIGH-THROUGHPUT COMMUNITY SEQUENCING AND BIOINFORMATICS (PLP 6905)
Spring 2019
This course covers DNA-based data generation, processing, and statistical analyses. Students learn how to design metabarcoding studies, how to use bioinformatics pipelines to filter, denoise, merge, and cluster sequences, and how to infer taxonomy from high-throughput sequencing data. They also learn the appropriate multivariate statistical methods needed to visualize their data and test hypotheses.
ADVANCED BIOSTATISTICS BIOL 404/504
Fall Semester
This course is a primer in advanced biostatistical analysis using R. It will prepare you to tackle difficult problems such as non-linearity, non-independence, non-normal distributions, having too much data, and more! This course is a user’s guide to a wide variety of advanced statistical tools. Most importantly, this course will empower you to tackle any data challenge by providing confidence through practical experience with R and modern analytical methods in a friendly and helpful environment. You will leave the course with a toolkit of R-scripts that you wrote and that can be re-purposed for many of the future data challenges. This course is a graduate-level and upper-level undergraduate biology option.
AQUATIC ECOLOGY BIOL 426
Spring Semester
Aquatic Ecology is the study of aquatic organisms and how they interact with their physical and chemical environments. This course focuses on freshwater aquatic systems - especially lakes, ponds, and streams. We discuss the importance of freshwater ecosystems and the physical and chemical processes that make them work. We explore the diversity of plants, animals, and microbes that live in freshwater and the ecological processes that support as well as destroy aquatic diversity. We also gain hands-on experience in important field measurement and sampling techniques and the identification of aquatic organisms.