Due to the impact my own education and undergraduate research experiences had on my learning and career, I embraced opportunities to teach during my Ph.D., and I have continued to participate in instructor training programs as a postdoctoral scholar. In particular, I have benefitted from programming from the Vanderbilt University Institute for the Advancement of Higher Education (AdvancED, formerly the Center for Teaching), the University of Minnesota’s Center for Educational Innovation, and The Carpentries, a global non-profit dedicated to teaching coding and data science.
My own experience as a student has undoubtedly shaped my own teaching philosophy. I strive to build an inclusive classroom and to provide students with hands-on learning opportunities. In particular, I use backwards design to build my curricula, active learning methods to promote student engagement, and low-stakes assessments to measure student learning.
I am particularly proud of designing and teaching my own course while a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University, “Intro to Genomics,” in which students learned genome assembly and annotation techniques using publicly available data to assemble mitochondrial genomes. I submitted the mitochondrial genomes to NCBI for future use by any researchers interested. Thanks to the generous support of both the Department of Biological Sciences and Evolutionary Studies at Vanderbilt, the class was able to publish our results in Microbiology Resource Announcements.
E. Anne Hatmaker, Ph.D. 