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I am a founding member of the Biology Education Research Group (BERG) at the University of Washington, focusing on projects aimed at improving teaching evaluations and developing in-class activities that teach mechanistic reasoning in structure and function. In addition to biology education research, I continue to pursue my interest in the role of epigenetic mechanisms and chromatin modification in environmental adaptation in plants. My research involves undergraduates in a cell and molecular biology laboratory course I developed, titled 'Experiments in Molecular Biology'. Given the sessile nature of plants, they must rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions, suggesting that chromatin-mediated mechanisms play a key role in altering gene expression programs. I have chosen Arabidopsis as a model system to investigate the role of epigenetic mechanisms in adaptation due to the public availability of transgenic lines that disrupt chromatin regulatory genes. I received my B.A. in Biology and French Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1987 and earned my Ph.D. in Microbiology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1993. After completing two postdoctoral fellowships focused on gene regulation and chromatin regulation at the University of Calgary and the University of Cincinnati, I joined the University of Washington in 2000. I was promoted to Principal Lecturer in the Department of Biology in 2006 and hold the title of Teaching Professor, reflecting my advocacy for teaching faculty.
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