Web Pages for Research and Teaching

Web Pages for Teaching and Research

Stephen H. Jenkins

Department of Biology, University of Nevada, Reno

Teaching

Temporary link to guest lecture for Psychiatry Grand Rounds: An eclectic view of how science works: implications for psychiatry

I teach the following courses on a regular basis at UNR. For students enrolled in the courses, material is available through our WebCampus program. For others, please contact me for recent syllabi or answers to specific questions.

Biology 125 -- How Science Works: Biological Case Studies: This is a new course that I taught for the first time in Spring 2009. It is an introductory course for nonscience majors focusing on critical thinking. Here is a brief description:

Biology 125 is a different kind of introductory science course because it is not a broad survey of biology but instead a detailed exploration of seven or eight case studies. We spend about 2 weeks on each of these case studies. I can’t promise that all of the case studies will fascinate all students, but I hope that most will be interesting and exciting. Although the course isn’t a survey course, the case studies involve many of the fundamental areas of biology – evolution, ecology, genetics, behavior, growth and development, health and disease.

The main goal of the course is to help students develop critical thinking skills by applying them to timely and interesting questions in biology. We focus on evaluating different kinds of evidence for answering these questions. For example, randomized experiments are often considered the “gold standard” in medical research. Why is this the case? What are the limitations of experiments? What other kinds of evidence can be used to answer questions that aren’t amenable to experimental study, such as questions about large-scale ecological or evolutionary phenomena?

Science impacts our lives in countless ways. Our health depends on advances in basic biology and medicine. Wise environmental policies depend on understanding ecology and evolutionary biology. New scientific knowledge raises new ethical dilemmas. Yet too often nonscientists are content to leave science to the scientific “priesthood”, thinking that science is too complex and requires too much training and technical skill for ordinary mortals to understand.

Learning to think critically about scientific questions has several implications for students as individuals and as members of society. They will be able to evaluate news about health and nutrition more effectively, which may contribute to better personal decisions about these issues. They will also be prepared to vote more intelligently about issues that involve science, or about candidates for public office based on their positions on these issues. They will learn that science plays an important role in many personal, ethical, and social decisions, but is rarely the determining factor.

We will try to meet the main goal of this course by using concrete examples to consider three general questions:

(1) How can we use observations, comparisons, experiments, models, and other methods to develop evidence about new ideas?

(2) How can we use quantitative methods to evaluate evidence and cope with uncertainty?

(3) How can writing sharpen critical thinking about ideas and evidence in science?

Here is the syllabus for Spring 2009. There will be some changes in Spring 2010 -- new examples, more "hands-on" work in lab.

Biology 314 -- Ecology & Population Biology: This is a core course in ecology for students majoring in Biology and related fields. It includes topics in evolutionary ecology, physiological ecology, population ecology, community ecology, and ecosystem ecology. In addition to standard lectures, we use several case studies in ecological analysis that involve discussion of problems in small groups and independent writing assignments. In Spring 2008, the case studies were Dissecting changing ranges (global climate change and butterfly distributions), Search for the missing sea otters: an ecological detective story, and Is framing fruitful (educating nonscientists about climate change)?

Biology 434 -- Mammalogy: This is an introduction to mammalian biology including structure, function, evolution, behavior, ecology, and biogegraphy. There is a lecture component and a laboratory-field component in which students learn characteristics of mammals, identification of local mammals, and field techniques for behavioral and population ecology. Students typically do a project which culminates in a scientific paper. This course will be taught in Fall 2008.

Biology/EECB 750 -- Research Design in Ecology: This is a core course in research design for students in the EECB Program and may also be useful for graduate students in Biology, ERS, and related fields. We range widely from philosophy of science to detailed discussion of some statistical topics, although the course is not a substitute for hard-core statistics. There is a lab in which we use computer simulations to explore issues in experimental design such as pseudoreplication, power analysis, etc. There is a great deal of writing, focused on gaining experience at writing effective research proposals. This course will be taught in Fall 2009.

Research

Individual Variation in Behavior -- Most of my current empirical research involves individual variation in the behavior of kangaroo rats. My interest in this was sparked by the discovery that Merriam's kangaroo rats (Dipodomys merriami) exhibit great variation in food-hoarding behavior, from larderhoarding most of the seeds they harvest in their burrows to scatterhoarding most of their food in small, widely dispersed caches throughout their home ranges (in the lab where most of our studies have been done, burrows are artificial next boxes and "home ranges" are sand-filled arenas). Here is a link to my CV, which lists publications on this and other research topics: CV for Stephen H. Jenkins, July 2008 .

How science works: evaluating evidence in biology and medicine (Oxford University Press, 2004) -- In this book, I use some contemporary examples of diverse questions in biology and medicine to illustrate how scientists develop and test hypotheses. The main topics are Does vitamin C benefit health?, Can dogs identify criminal suspects by smell?, Why are frogs in trouble?, How do animals find stored food?, What causes cancer?, Why do we age?, How does coffee affect health?,and How will climate change affect the spread of disease?One of my major aims was to give nonscientists some tools for thinking more critically about science stories in the news, not so they could reject what they read more authoritatively, but so they could separate the wheat from the chaff more effectively. Here is a link to view the cover of the book and here is a link for more information about it.

Feral Horse Population Model - This is a computer program that simulates the population dynamics of feral horses. It was written under a contract from the National Wild Horse and Burro Program of the Bureau of Land Management and is designed for use in comparing various management strategies for feral horses.

The Windows version of the program is available for download by clicking on the link below. To install it, save eqsetup.exe in a suitable directory on your hard drive. Then click on eqsetup.exe to begin the installation process, and follow the instructions which appear on the screen.

Download Windows Version: eqsetup.exe (This is version 1.40, loaded on 2 April 2002.)

Do you have a question? Send an email to jenkins at unr dot edu.