People

I am an Associate Teaching Professor and I am very interested in learning how people develop critical thinking skills and hone their ability to think creatively in the context of biology. Some of the questions I am currently interested in are: how to help students understand and critically think about scientific papers? how do experts and novices think about biological data? to what extend does the wording of an assignment influence how students deploy critical thinking skills?

I joined the faculty as a teaching professor in 2018. After receiving my PhD in Neuroscience from UCSD, I worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow. Though my background is in visual and systems neuroscience, I am now focused on developing best practices for training a diverse generation of scientists. Ashley co-directs the Contiguous BS/MS program as well as STARTneuro.

Originally trained as a biologist, I shifted to a biology education research focus after my PhD. I’m interested broadly in how student experiences in the classroom and lab influence the development of critical thinking skills and ways of thinking about science and research.

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution section in the Division of Biological Sciences. My current research is split between biology education research focusing on how to reduce barriers to learning bioinformatics, and biological research on evolutionary innovations and microbial interactions, conducted in part with undergraduates through CUREs in the Microbiology Lab course (BIMM 121).

I am broadly interested in helping students develop as biologists by learning things other than biology: experimental design, data analysis, communication, information literacy, critical thinking, and ethics. Through a combination of curriculum development and pedagogical research, my goal is to create toolkits for students and educators to use for the creation and evaluation of scientific information, specifically in topics related to ecology, evolution, and genetics.

Our group’s research has focused on student assessments. In particular we have investigated how students engage with tests; why they use certain strategies over others; and whether we can alter the structure of our assessments to improve long(er)-term retention of course content.