Overview

My teaching expertise heavily involves the area of microbiology including industrial and medical microbiology in particular fermentation technology and drug discovery and microbial ecology.  I teach undergraduate students in second, third and fourth years of undergraduate curricula.  Besides teaching upper level students, I am also enthusiastic to teach lower level students as this provides an opportunity to electrify them about microbiology and current/relevant research in the field.

Besides my cave microbiology research, I am very much interested in how students learn and pedagogically what can help them understand microbiology.  In 2009, I was selected as one of the biology research residency scholars in the ASM/NSF Biology Research Residency Scholars Program and participated in an NSF-sponsored residency to improve my understanding and practice of evidenced-based teaching and learning.  This undertaking is a multiyear leadership program for college/university biology faculty to bring about reforms in undergraduate science education and it focuses on developing biologists’ knowledge and skills in evidenced-based research in learning.  At the moment, I have three on-going research projects in teaching pedagogy, these include Murder by HIV (Effect of a real life case study in upper level molecular Evolution course, refer to published case study in the publication section); Does experiential learning impact students’ career awareness, appreciation of the microbial world, and motivation in microbiology courses; Concept Assessment in an introductory microbiology course taught at a US community college vs. a Canadian four year university.