I REGULARLY TEACH THE FOLLOWING COURSES

1) PARASITOLOGY - Parasitology has traditionally been taught as a course where you learn about the taxonomic classification and systematics of different groups of organisms, many of which are not closely related to each other. Yet, that knowledge is available to anyone willing to dive into a parasitology textbook, and then it becomes a memorizing and bookkeeping record of parasite groups with little or no insight into their ecological and evolutionary relevance. Thus, this course focuses on developing a strong ecological and evolutionary foundation to understand the amazing world of parasites. Of course, we cover the basics of important parasitic groups (e.g., nematoda, acantocephala, apicomplexa) during the course, along with examples via scientific readings on the ecology and evolution of those groups.

2) ORNITHOLOGY - Birds represent the best-known animal group and one of the favorite animals for lay people to enjoy, either as bird watchers or just by contemplating them and doing art, paintings, sculptures of them. There is the scientific part of studying birds, however, and no ornithology course would be complete without a lab section, so in this course we combine lectures with activities both in the lab and in the field (i.e., fixed-radius bird census method, mist netting). I hope you find this course rewarding and full of enticing information that will want you to continue studying this amazing group of animals.

3) THEORETICAL ECOLOGY - During the last three decades every branch of biology has become increasingly quantitative, which makes the development of quantitative skills a must in order to be competitive in biological sciences. If you are afraid of numbers and formulas, and lack programming skills, then this course will help you to get rid of that fear by providing you with the very basic skills for the quantitative biology path. All necessary skills are built from scratch. So, you are looking at many hours of learning the R language before we move onto the more quantitative portion of the course.

4) BIODIVERSITY 2 (BSC 2011) - Biodiversity is an analysis of biological systems at the organismal level: evolution, speciation, history of life, and ecology. This course is designed to introduce students to the diversity of life. We start by reviewing evolutionary theory and then conduct an overview of the major groups of living organisms. We finish by looking at how organisms interact with each other and their environment and how populations grow and interact with one another.