Can you describe the path that led you to Emma Willard School?

I did my undergraduate at the University of Connecticut and entered as a pre-vet student. I was very interested in animals for a long time and knew that I had some proclivity for science. I quickly realized that I didn't want to do that, and so after my first year, I switched to human medicine, and that wasn’t for me either. So I was like, ‘How can I be into science and animals and do only the parts of science that I really want to do and nothing else?’ And so that led me into primary academic research. 

I ended up working at UConn for two and a half years in a lab on insect development and evolution. From there, I went right into my PhD at the University of Montana. There, I studied insects again, but I was mostly focused on evolution and really interested in understanding how, in a broad sense, the amount of food an individual of any species gets as a juvenile affects how they look as an adult. Through that opportunity, I got paid as a teaching assistant for introductory biology and entomology courses, which I ended up really loving. So I wrote and received a grant to do a teaching postdoc at Colby College directly after my PhD. The grant was focused on bringing in kids from groups that are traditionally underrepresented into a hands-on setting within the sciences. 

After that, and after a few other positions teaching at the college and high school levels, the Emma job popped up in my job search. I was really inspired by what the school and the teachers had to offer—you could take that kind of college-level exploration and bring that to the high school level, which is the level I enjoyed teaching the most.

 

What does it mean to be working at an all-girls school as a father of girls? 

My mind goes back to opportunity and the freedom to explore. Women in science are consistently up against adversity, and it's unfortunately naive to think that it’s going away, but that's not the case here, right? There's a real level playing field where these young women can have so many opportunities. Then they have the space emotionally to be their genuine selves in a way that I have not seen elsewhere. And it's really beautiful. 

I want to teach at a place where I would be comfortable sending my kids. Every kid I see and interact with, I'm like, if my kid grew up to be you or had this experience, that would be wonderful. And so, being able to, as a dad, see that trajectory forward and put yourself in the shoes of the students’ parents, I find that really satisfying and encouraging, in a way, to keep doing what I'm doing. 

 

How did you develop your AS Entomology course, and how is it going?

I have taught the course before at the 400-level at the University of Montana, which is the highest level you could go in coursework. It was an intense four-credit course with a separate lab component. I had the bones, but I had too much information. My central tenet was to engage the students intellectually, academically, and from as many angles as I possibly could. 

So we do traditional tests, but we also do hands-on assessments, dissections, fieldwork, written papers, podcasts, and explore historical literature of how insects interact. My goal was to slam those things together—it's working in some respects, but not in others. It's a new thing, I'm very much building the plane as I'm flying! There's so much anatomy that I want to teach the kids, and I've had to cut it down for the high school level. So the experience has been strange. It's been a combination of ideal Emma learning and a traditional collegiate-level course, and trying to match those both in my mind and in the classroom. 

 

What are your impressions of the Emma community—students and colleagues?

The students are awesome and wonderful to work with. The institution, plus the students, creates this perfect ecosystem in which you can explore science—and plenty of other things—but science is the thing I'm thinking about all the time! Opportunity is the thing that I come back to: the labs, the physical things we have are great, and the students can explore them—the flexibility that's afforded to the students, both practically and intellectually. 

The faculty is incredible. The willingness of the administration and other faculty to support [the entomology course creation] is unlike my past institutions. Plus, the flexibility of students to say, "I want to take a step back from traditional science and move into this kind of riskier space of intellectual flexibility,” is really cool as well.