Organismic & Evolutionary Biology
2022–2023
Denise Yoon
My work this year focused on strengthening the first year graduate seminar course, OEB399, and creating a curriculum that prepares grad students for their life and teaching at Harvard and in OEB. By centering community within the G1 cohort and providing structure and real experience with pedagogical techniques, I hoped to provide a space in which first year students can grow and thrive with their colleagues and begin to find their place in their labs and within OEB. By creating learning modules that will stay with the department after my tenure as the Pedagogy Fellow, I hope that future OEB399 classes will be high quality and standardized from year to year.
In addition to the work that I did in restructuring the overall course content, I also emphasized principles of inclusive teaching, creating a unit on inclusive pedagogy, which involved workshops, a panel from the History of Science department, and case studies on LGBTQ+ inclusive language in collaboration with Roya Huang, a former PF in MCB.
2020–2021
Nick Herrmann
One goal of OEB’s pedagogy course is to help first-year students form a positive community. To that end, I gave students the opportunity to “share their story,” which I modeled during our first class. I talked for about 8 minutes about where I’m from, my family, my work, and my hobbies, and then I took questions. Over the rest of the year, 15 of 18 students opted to share their own stories. Acclimating to graduate school remotely is not easy. Still, I think many students ended the year feeling connected to their classmates and to the department.
2019–2020
Ava Mainieri
Every 4th year OEB graduate student is required to present their research at a department-wide symposium during the spring of their G4. In preparation for the symposium, I created several workshops to help with public speaking and presentation preparation. These included sessions on oration, figure design, and practice talks. These workshops were designed not only to inspire graduate students to attend, but provide tools applicable to all areas of science communication.