My teaching rests on a simple conviction: durable understanding comes from grasping the principles that govern how biological systems behave. Whether I am at the microscope with a clinical trainee, in the classroom with grad students, or at the bench with a lab member, my goal is to help learners reason from first principles, so that they can tackle problems they've never seen before.
Courses
I have just completed my fourth year as co-director of the Genetics and Genomics course (BIOM252). It is the only survey genetics course for graduate students at UC San Diego, drawing 20–25 students each year from BMS, the Neurosciences Graduate Program, and Biological Sciences, among others; students in the Genetics Training Program (T32) take two years of it. My co-director Radha Ayyagari and I assemble ten weeks of lectures from across the San Diego genetics community, each pairing a leading scientist’s lecture with student-led discussion of related papers. The course alternates between two annual cycles—one on principles of inheritance and disease, the other on genetic technology.
Students consistently rate the course’s lectures, intellectual value, and overall effectiveness from “Very Good” to “Excellent,” and they particularly value its breadth and its exposure to active research areas. My own lectures—on chromatin structure, histone modifications, and the methods used to study them—fall in alternating years. Students regularly note that the material was new to them yet came through clearly; several priased the "science storytelling" of the lectures.
For three years I have lectured in the core cellular and molecular neuroscience course (NEUG200A, ~30 students) and, this past year, in NEUG221 (Epigenetics and Gene Regulation in the Brain, ~12 students). Each year I take part in the Mentoring Up sessions for incoming BMS students (BIOM203A; ~15 students); this year I was the only BMS faculty member to join all three. I am an active member of the Genetics Training Program (T32), whose journal clubs and annual retreat I attend with my students.
Mentoring
My lab is small, with two graduate students and seven undergraduates. I emphasize rigorous, reproducible experimental design (in quantitative genomics and proteomics, the choice of controls and analytic parameters demands care from the outset). I also focus on written communication, asking students to draft their own figures and manuscripts, which we then revise together. My students routinely approach a problem in a way I would not have, write a more elegant pipeline, or identify a pattern in the data that reframes a project; I try to create the conditions for turning those observations into genuine insight by posing hard, open-ended questions and working beside them on the execution and analysis. I want them to leave not only as capable scientists but as people who have felt the exhilaration of discovery.
Despite starting my lab in an early wave of the pandemic (October 2020) and training students through a period of remote work and limited in-person contact that did not ease until roughly 2023, several trainees have gone on to competitive doctoral programs. (See my CV.) I am proud that, given the circumstances, so many have continued in science.
To learn more about the members of our lab, see our Team page.
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