Colleagues and I, each having our own frustrations with knowing how to effectively teach mathematics and statistics to biology students, came together to foster a community of like-minded instructors.  Fast-forward a few years, and QUBES is a vibrant community of 1000s of faculty and students engaged with teaching and learning quantitative biology.  Highlights include an open-education resource (OER) publishing platform to share more than 1700 high-quality teaching resources, an innovative faculty development approach called “faculty mentoring networks” that bring together domain experts with faculty to modify and implement lessons, and a community portal with 100’s of groups that support collaboration, communication and comradery. Having played a part in building this vibrant community is something I’m grateful for and proud of.

Supported by NSF Awards 1446269,  1446284,  1446258.

Students often have had negative experiences when learning mathematics, and those prior experiences and their anxiety can limit their progress.  My colleague Arietta Fleming-Davies and I created BIOMAAP to tackle this problem. We developed resources students and faculty could use to reduce affective barriers to learning math in the biology classroom.  Seeing more students achieve the skills needed of a well-trained biologist, by attending to how they think about math and their ability to learn it, has been very rewarding.

Supported by NSF Award 1612072.

I had the good fortune to spend a semester at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, studying the Red-eyed Treefrog, and I was able to bring an undergraduate student to help.  Nearly every day, we’d encounter something amazing. The value of these experiences for early-career biologists was so obvious, as was the fact that very few of my students back home would be able to share them.  AIMS (Analyzing Images to learn Mathematics and Statistics) was born out of that frustration, and is an attempt to bring a bit of those lab and field experiences to students regardless of their actual environs.  The logic is simply to engage students with sets of images and videos of fascinating biology – whether it be leaf-cutter ants foraging on the forest floor in Panama, or in breast cancer tissue architecture – and teach some math and stats skills along the way. 

Supported by NSF Award 1431671.