Teaching

Spring 2016 at LSU

BIOL 3040: Evolution

"There is grandeur in this view of life..." - C. Darwin

"Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution." - T. Dobzhansky

Evolution is the most important concept in all of biology. The overarching goal of evolutionary science is incredibly ambitious: to reconstruct the Tree of Life relating all living things and understand the forces that have caused (and continue to cause) changes all across the Tree. In addition to giving us new eyes through which to view the living world, evolutionary science allow us to design vaccines, solve crimes, prioritize funds for conservation, produce crops with higher yields, solve difficult computational problems, create useful molecules, and personalize medical care. In this course, we will discuss the history of evolutionary thought, the forces that drive evolution, techniques for studying evolution, and the many ways that evolutionary thinking encriches and improves our lives. 

The book: Evolution by Bergstrom and Dugatkin

Other evolution resources:

The Darwin-Wallace Papers - Read to the Linnean Society of London on July 1st, 1858

The Darwin Correspondence Project - To whom was Darwin writing today?  And about what?

The Evolution and Medicine Review - A blog about the burgeoning field of evolutionary medicine.

This View of Life - Promoting the relevance of evolution to everyday life

 

Fall 2015 at LSU

BIOL 7800: Computational Phylogenetics

Some Useful Links:

 

Workshops

I have taught about Bayesian phylogenetic methods at the Bodega Bay Applied Phylogenetics Workshop and NESCent sponsored workshops on phylogenomics.  As part of the Bodega Bay workshop, we developed and maintain a website with lecture slides, tutorials, and an active blog covering phylogenetic concepts and recent research: TreeThinkers.  We also maintain a Twitter account: @TreeThinkers.