After completing my PhD in 1999, I spent the next several years teaching various community college and university classes in biology and environmental science. Through these experiences, teaching has become a great passion of mine, and I know I will continue to teach -in one form or another- for the rest of my days.

I firmly believe that young people will represent the catalyst for the necessary change towards a more sustainable existence on our planet. Needless to say, a quality education for our youth is a crucial pre-requisite for this hope for change.

For the past 10 years, I have been working with Dr. David Epel and Pam Miller -a former High School teacher at Seaside High School- on a variety of biology education projects for the web. All of our educational materials are freely-accessible, interactive, inquiry driven, and directed at high school and college students. Pam & I have designed much of the content, and I have been responsible for the web and basic Flash design on these sites.

Virtual Urchin is an ever-expanding collection of resources and activities to teach about biology and microscopy using the sea urchin as an example.

Our current project - Inquiry to Student Environmental Action (I2SEA) - explores the effectiveness of direct student-to-student communication, using the Internet, to confront environmental problems and envision solutions. We have developed a series of curricular tools, including an online ocean acidification activity and virtual lab, and a student-oriented international carbon footprint calculator.

The latter is part of a larger program that we call the International Student Carbon Footprint Challenge (ISCFC), where participating schools all around the world calculate their footprints and then engage in online conversations with their peers worldwide to discuss what they learned and envision solutions on personal, community and global levels.

Email me if you would like additional details on any of the aforementioned education projects.

--click here for a list of my teaching and related job experience--