Teaching

I believe that establishing a connection between students and research is critical, as it engages their attention and illustrates the scientific process. A lot of my teaching experience has involved the interaction of students with computing technology, often teaching them how to use unfamiliar computer command line software. The careful integration of technology can give students the freedom to interact with and analyze real scientific data while developing important transferable skills such as basic computer programming. Where possible I endeavor to make all my teaching materials available online for others to use, please follow the links below.

Bodega Bay Applied Phylogenetics Workshop

I have been an instructor at this week-long workshop for graduate students from all over the world for the past six years. I teach continuous trait evolution with a focus on state-dependent trait diversification using the software Brownie written by Brian O’Meara and more recently the ‘R’ function brownie.lite written by Liam Revell and the R package OUwie by Jeremy Beaulieu and colleagues. Rates of character evolution are not only interesting in their own right but are also a useful tool for other comparative analyses such as ancestral state reconstruction and, in a morphological context, Brownian rates of evolution can be used as phylogenetically corrected estimates of morphological variance. You can find my presentation, tutorial and example data files for the Brownie.lite ‘R’ tutorial here and OUwie here.

Curriculum Development

While a postdoc at NESCent I was an active participant in “Evolution in Action” an Education and Outreach Working group on using Applied Evolution to teach evolutionary biology. This was an eye-opening experience working with highly experienced educators to develop a curriculum to illustrate the application of evolutionary biology to real-world problems. One case-study that I have found particularly useful for generating interest in phylogenetics is the use of scientific and popular press articles concerning a criminal case where a doctor was accused and convicted of deliberately infecting his ex-girlfriend with HIV from one of his patients. There is a great write-up about this curriculum written by John Jungk one of the PI’s of the working group in the journal of the International Union of Biology teachers. Jungck, John R. Evolution in Action: Quantitative Evolutionary Biology Education, Biology International 47 which is available here.

AnthroTREE Workshop

Online course development

I was an invited participant at the DryadLad Workshop (Dec 2011) to develop online educational materials with DataDryad the online data repository (www.datadryad.org). The module I helped to develop is based on a dataset associated with my paper on artiodactyl extinction risk (Price & Gittleman 2007). It teaches students about extinction as an evolutionary process and its relationship to current conservation issues. It allows students to interact with and analyze data in a large classroom or lecture setting. It will be available online soon.

Evolutionary Analysis in ‘R’ Workshop

The main goal of this workshop, devised and written by myself and my colleague Roi Holzman, was to familiarise participants with the use of ‘R’ to run phylogenetic analysis. The emphasis was on "what's available" and "how to use it" with few references to the theory behind the methods. There were four 2-hour sessions in May 2010, each hour was devoted to a new topic 1) Basic Introduction to R 2) Introduction to using phylogenies in R 3) Speciation & Diversification 4) Discrete data analysis 5) Continuous data analysis with a Brownian motion model 6) Continuous data analysis with an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model 7) Phyloecology 8) Plotting publication quality phylogeny figures. You can find all the tutorials and the files used here, please feel to use, modify and distribute them.

UC Davis EVE 198: Undergraduate Introduction to ‘R’ and evolutionary analysis.

This was a hands-on directed group study class for students unfamiliar with the ‘R’ statistical framework. I covered basic topics such as data formats, plotting, simple statistics as well as phylogenetic visualization and basic phylogenetic comparative methods. Each class combined quick lectures on specific topics with follow along demonstration and ended with a set of questions to work through that applied the newly learnt concepts as well as those covered on previous days. Extensively documented R code that formed the basis of the class along with the datasets is available via dropbox - please email me to get the link.

NESCent Academy 2014: Paleobiological and phylogenetic approaches to macroevolution

I and two colleagues received funding to run a NESCent Academy workshop for graduate students, postdocs and faculty to teach traditional paleobiological stratigraphic methods, phylogenetic methods and combined approaches to analyze stratigraphic and tree-based data. We had a combination of participants and instructors from paleobiology and biology and covered a wide variety of subjects from estimating speciation and extinction rates through to patterns of disparity and models of trait evolution. All the tutorials and presentations, including mine, can be found here.

Phylogenetic Approaches to Biodiversity Workshop

I taught a 3-day hands-on workshop at the Universidad de Concepcion 2-5th Nov. 2015. The goals were that by the end of the workshop students will 1) Understand the fundamental models of character and lineage diversification 2) Know how to implement these models to test hypotheses using the R statistical framework 3) Understand some of the limitations of these methods and how to assess the appropriateness of the model using simulation. All lectures and extensively documented R code are currently available via Box - please email me to get the link while I set up a webpage for it.

X Contact: saprice at ucdavis dot edu, Department of Evolution & Ecology, 1 Shields Avenue, UC Davis, CA 95616