Courses
My teaching philosophy is centered on preparing students for a lifetime of learning and I strive for alignment between the scientific community and my courses. I am dedicated to providing an interactive environment where students take ownership over their education and begin to learn how to use the tools around them to move forward in school, and eventually, a career. By providing real world examples from the literature, students become more comfortable with scientific writing and reading, skills that are vital to succeeding in academia or a science-based professional career.
ENVS 100: Introduction to Environmental Science
This course is an introduction to the field of environmental science, examined from multiple perspectives: biology, earth sciences, chemistry, and physics. The class focuses on the contributions these different disciplines make to the diagnosis and solution of environmental problems, with an emphasis on the interdisciplinary nature of these issues. Whittier College.
ENVS 352: Long-Term Environmental Change
Through its history the Earth system has experienced large climatic fluctuations and has undergone periods of glacial expansion followed by warming trends. The understanding of the links between climate and ecosystems of the past can inform on current and future climate changes. This course exposes the students to a number of techniques used to reconstruct past climate, with particular emphasis on the use of isotopes. Recent warming trends are investigated with particular focus on the ecosystems' response to current and predicted global change. Whittier College.
ENVS 210: Climate Change and Society
This course focuses on climate change and how it influences and is caused by human societies. Topics include current climate issues and brief science behind it, human use of resources, energy, and food, globalization and the inequality in sustainability/impact of climate change. Climate change is the central topic of our world today, however addressing climate change can only be successful in the framework of human perception and culture. Whittier College.
ENVS 255: Spatial Analysis in Environmental Science
This course provides an introduction to spatial analysis and its applications in wildlife spatial ecology, landscape ecology and briefly planning how spatial analysis can be used to plan cities. Topics covered include methods used to track animals, and the impact spatial analysis has on the study of land use and landscape change over time, environmental impact analysis, disaster and natural resource management, and to help us plan for a future of increased urbanization. The laboratory section of this course with go over the basics of using QGIS, a user friendly, open source geographic information systems software to generate maps and conduct introductory analyses of spatial data. Whittier College.