RECENT TRAINING EFFORTS OF THE PI
Dr. Brent Mishler has an extensive record of teaching and mentoring
students at the
undergraduate and graduate level, and indeed has taught the majority of
graduate
students in bryology in the United States over the last decade. He
currently
participates in four undergraduate classes, a Freshman Seminar on the
Darwinian
Revolution, a phylogenetic survey of plant diversity (co-taught with Dr.
J. Taylor
and Dr. L. Feldman), a new course in molecular evolution (co-taught with
Dr. M.
Slatkin), and an intensive field research class in tropical biology and
geology
(co-taught with a number of other faculty members). The latter class
meets every day
of the week for a few weeks on campus, then moves to the UC Berkeley Gump
Research Station on Moorea in French Polynesia for over two months, with
the
faculty rotating down there for 2 or 3 week intervals. This format
results in a
rewarding teaching and learning experience, since it allows a unique
level of
involvement of faculty and students in field research.
Mishler's main effort in formal graduate education has been a course in
phylogenetic systematics (IB 200, co-taught with Dr. D. Lindberg), a
general and
rigorous introduction to theory and method, with a laboratory component
on
numerical methods. This course, focusing as it does on what is general
in
systematics, rather then on specific taxonomic groups, has already
developed into a
popular, central core to the training program in systematics across
several
departments at UC Berkeley.
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