Justin Shaffer answered some of my questions about online quizzes in an episode of his exceptionally entertaining and educational podcast, Recombinant Teaching. Listen to the episode here. 

Master's student Chloe Romm presented a short talk at the Towson University Summer Research Conference. Chloe shared results of her research on how students use Learning Objective to study. 

I was invited to talk about assessment design as part of SABER's Professional Development in Evidence-Based Teaching Seminar Series. 

This seminar was inspired by my finding that introductory biology courses tend to focus on testing facts about science rather than students' ability to do science.  Rebecca Orr and I discuss methods and tools for assessing scientific practices. 

I was invited to co-host the Science Slam during the 2026 NoCoast SciComm Conference. The theme of of the Science Slam this year was "SciComm Rom-Com" and the contestants (i.e., "Slammers") shared their favorite science love stories. You can catch a re-run of the Science Slam here

Check out our new paper in JMBE! This paper is part of a series where we investigated how the scores on the same biology concept assessment can vary widely based on how that concept assessment is administered. 

In the first paper of the series, we found that students taking concept assessments outside of class time tended to have spend longer amounts of time and have higher scores on the assessment. In the second paper, we repeated the outside-of-class testing conditions to try to figure out why they were spending longer on the assessment. The majority of students reported using external resources, like the internet or their notes, when taking the assessment, providing one explanation for their higher scores. In this last paper of the series, we investigated whether students' use of these external resources would be affected by graded (higher stakes) or ungraded (lower stakes) conditions. We found students in the higher stakes conditions were much more likely to report using external resources. 

We recieved National Science Foundation funding for our project "Tools for Teaching and Assessing Visual Literacy in Biotechnology." This project was funded through the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program.

I'll be working with Kate Wright and Dina Newman to develop a Visual Literacy Toolkit that can help instructors better teach and assess visual literacy skills related to common biotechnology diagrams.

My publication about how "bad" AI can be used for "good" biology teaching was featured as a highly-cited article by ASM Journals. 

I shared some of the first work out of my new lab at the SABER 2026 meeting! 

At the conference, I was also invited to participate in the DBER-SiT panel, where I shared about my experiences navigating a career in discipline-based education research.