Teaching
I've been lucky to help supervise some very talented and enthusiastic undergraduate students, who have explored, and tested the extent of, diversity and homology in geometrid wing patterns using image processing techniques and the wonderful digitised archive of the Natural History Museum. Minus the technical language – we use vast collections of digital images of pinned moths to identify the presence of conserved wing pattern elements or ‘rules’ in a specific group of moths. Moths (and butterfly) wings are well known for their beautiful wing patterns. Beyond this aesthetic value, these patterns are often incredibly finely tuned for specific ecological interactions, such as predator avoidance (e.g. camouflage, aposematism and deimatic displays).
My interest in pursuing a better understanding of these family-wide evo-devo concepts is a natural extension of working on the peppered moth system, as ultimately between-species diversity necessarily originates as within-species diversity! Conversely, wing patterns are constrained by genetic architecture and so understanding what these broader constraints are can inform our understanding of how variation in wing pattern phenotypes within a single species can originate and what their ecological impact might be.
I've produced teaching materials and demonstrating on an introduction to Python module (BIOL 733). I have also demonstrated on other informatics-adjacent modules.
More informally, I try to be approachable and available to PhD students and colleagues making a transition to working with sequencing data or to an unfamiliar computer cluster environment. Turns out you can learn a lot from trying to install the latest fancy bioinformatics software!