Teaching

Seven Kenyan high school students making goofy poses during a class field trip to an area with trees

Promoting Equity in Education

Education & Social Empowerment Program (EaSEP), Nandi Hills, Kenya

Five students gather to see the blue-tailed skink one is holding in his hand

Field-Based Learning

PLS 147: California Plant Communities

Field Trip to Jepson Prairie Reserve, Dixon, CA

A meme: A loggerhead shrike labeled "Professor Kouba" is holding a dead mouse (labeled "the people who made this graph"—the mouse is holding a pie chart)

Student-Centered Teaching

EVE 101, Introductory Ecology:

Ecology Memes Assignment!

Courses I Have Taught

ECL 290, QE Support Group Workshop and Seminar – UC Davis, Spring 2024; 134 students (Lead Organizer)

ESP 001, Environmental Analysis & Policy – UC Davis, Fall 2023; ~300 students (Teaching Assistant)

PLS 147L, California Plant Communities Field Course – UC Davis, Spring 2023; 60 students (Teaching Assistant)

ESP 100, General Ecology – UC Davis, Fall 2022; 120 students (Instructor of Record)

EVE 101, Introductory Ecology – UC Davis, Spring and Summer 2022; 196, 59 students (Instructor of Record)

ESP 100, General Ecology – UC Davis, Fall 2020, 2021; ~120 students (Teaching Assistant)

ECL 290, Dendroecology Graduate Seminar – UC Davis, Winter 2020; ~12 students (Lead Organizer)

PLS 144, Trees and Forests – UC Davis, Fall 2019 (Teaching Assistant); 120 students

SPU 25, Climate-Energy Vision for the Future – Harvard University, Spring 2018; 80 students (Teaching Assistant)

SPU 29, Climate Energy Challenge – Harvard University, Fall 2017, 2020; ~60 students (Teaching Assistant)

Peer Learning Communities

Learning from colleagues and near-peers is an important way to expand and enrich course-based curriculum. In my final year at UC Davis, I founded the QE Support Group (flyer shown at right, below), bringing together 134 graduate students from 39 Ph.D.-granting programs from across campus. By pairing pre-QE students with post-candidacy mentors, and connecting them within a network of peers, the course fostered more equitable sharing of information about one of the toughest challenges of a doctoral program.

As a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz, inspired by Davis Ph.D. candidate Ben Rivera and in collaboration with Dr. Lucas Godoy, I have started a new iteration of the Statistics Support Group (flyer shown at left, below). We meet once a week to discuss a new stats method or question, sharing ideas, advice, and most importantly, encouragement. The group gives members a chance to get help from a friendly audience, usually folks who've encountered similar challenges in their own stats learning. In statistics as in life, there are things we don't know, but nothing we can't learn!

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