Tim's Teaching Page

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     As a graduate student, I knew I wanted to teach at a small liberal arts college so I gathered as much teaching experience as my mentors would allow. Consequently, I was able to participate in many extracurricular teaching activities such as the University of Georgia Teaching Assistant Mentors program. From these experiences, I graduated from UGA with about as much teaching experience as you can get while trying to write a dissertation. And that's a good thing because teaching is what I do, it's what I love, and it's why I'm at Lyon College. Here you will find a couple of useful things...particularly if you are a student. You may find out just why it is I have assigned such a horrible task if you read my teaching philosophy. My course webpages are all now hosted on Lyon's Educator system behind password protection. Here, you can find a description of some of the courses I regularly teach. If you are an instructor looking at this page for some information for your own course, please email me and I'll send you materials for any of these courses.

BIO100 Biology In Context: Human Disease. An introductory biology course for non-majors. We will examine the etiology and pathology of many human diseases. Along the way, hopefully, you'll learn a bit about how research biologists use information gleaned from research in non-humans (like worms and flies!) to help control human diseases such as cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, and diabetes to name just a few.

BIO100 Biology in Context: Biodiversity. After teaching the class above for a couple of years, I decided to change topics and teach something I'm becoming increasingly interested in: biodiversity. In this course, you will learn by doing as you spend time evaluating the biodiversity of a selected field site in addition to several field studies on aquatic biodiversity, invasive species, the flow of genetic material in the environment, and local flora and fauna.

BIO250 Cell Biology. This is the first biology course for returning biology sophomores. You probably have little choice about enrolling in this course but I will endeavor to make it worthwhile and engaging. We will dissect the cell to discover the common features of all cells as well as examine the remarkable features of more specialized cells. By trade, I'm a cell biologist and I believe my chosen career path is one of the most exciting areas of modern biological research, I hope you will too!

BIO360 Comparative Physiology. Why does the axolotl image morph to the tiger salamander image? It's one of my favorite biological stories - enroll and I'll tell you what's going on! In this course, we examine the unique and common physiology of a number of different animals including the occasional Homo sapiens. Although I'm not a physiologist, this has turned out to be one of my favorite courses to teach and has had a postive impact on my own research career. In this class, students design and carry out semester long physiology research projects with my favorite model system: C. elegans. Look for a paper on these projects in American Biology Teacher sometime during 2006.

BIO364 Developmental Biology. Developmental biology is why I got into this business in the first place. Think of it, we all start life as a single cell which divides into two identical cells. How can those cells give rise to heads and tails, fronts and backs, lefts and rights, much less hearts and bones? Enroll and I'll tell you what we know.

BIO420 Special Topics in Bioinformatics. Modern biological research has been transformed by the advent of high-throughput genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics approaches. In this class, we will examine the application of these techniques to understanding fundamental biology.

BIO420 Special Topics in Biodiversity. If the nonmajors class goes as well as I hope, I plan to develop a biodiversity course for upper level biology majors. Think: "Biodiversity of Lyon College" or "Biodiversity at the Meeting of the Mississippi Delta and Ozark Mountains"

An Idea and Hopefully a Future WWW Page:
C. elegans as a teaching tool: a resource for undergraduate educators not lucky enough to study worms in their research labs. Lab modules and hints for starting nematodes at your school. YIKES! I missed my chance, it's already here: WormClassroom.