Tina Bell

PhD candidate
University of Georgia
Genetics Department
tmbell[at]uga.edu

Education: B.S. Zoology, University of Florida, 2001

Throughout my life, I have been motivated by my love of the natural world and the gical processes that create and maintain it. Specifically, I have been the most inspired by the ocean or the marine environment as it has been relatively unexplored and is a place where ecological and evolutionary interactions are still poorly understood. This inspiration has led me to a career in scientific research in marine evolutionary biology and education in the life sciences. One of the most fulfilling aspects of this career choice is teaching and interacting with students. Teaching, for me, whether it be an evolutionary biology or marine ecology course, is an opportunity to inspire an appreciation and curiosity for the natural world in my students. My goal as an educator is to produce students who are life‐long learners and thinkers, constantly evaluating the world around them, and who are eager to pass on their classroom knowledge to other students and the public at large.

I am a firm believer that students will not ever be truly active participants in their education if they are not engaged and interested in the topic. As a member of a large university, I see many students who act as passive particles in the classroom. They are not actively engaged in the course material and are searching for ways to succeed in a course through anonymity and rote memorization. In my classes, I feel that one of the easiest ways to engage these types of students is to spend time learning about the students and their academic background. From the first day of class I keep an open dtelling them about my life as a graduate student and my career as them about their lives and what they aspire to do. I try to create athe classroom, which, when combined with group activities and a the shyest of students actively participate in classroom discussion. From my first few classroom interactions with my students, I try to gather enough information about them so that I can tailor my class materials and examples to topics that interest them and are relevant to their career goals.

Evolutionary biology is vitally important in understanding many of the medical and ltural problems that we face today. The majority of my students have the intention of ing a medical or education degree; I feel they should all have a solid understanding of evolutionary processes and how they affect the world around us, from the color of the flowers in their yard to bacterial infections. When teaching evolutionary biology courses, I use examples and problems sets that illustrate the importance of evolution and natural selection (such as antibiotic resistance or herbivore resistance to pesticides) that I think will interest my students on many levels and encourage them to ask questions or research other topics that spark their interest. As many students learn in different ways, I try to incorporate different formats for the lecture material from group discussion, hands‐on examples, worksheets, and short videos so that the material is approachable to all types of learners. I have also found that presenting my own research and topics that are of interest to me and approaching them about current problems I face in designing experiments or interpreting results are opportunities for students to learn about research techniques and develop real‐world problem solving skills. Students are given the opportunity to design experiments through group and class activities where discuss the best avenues to test hypotheses and evaluate results. It is important to me for my students to have a working knowledge of these processes along with the scientific method in order to instill a future generation of scientists and educators with the ability to educate the public on the validity of evolutionary theory and environmental research.