Emily Beasley, Biology PhD Program
Lab Instruction Category

Emily Beasley recently defended her PhD in Biology at the University of Vermont. Originally from Kansas City, she graduated with a B.S. in Wildlife Biology and an M.S. in Biology from Missouri State University. As a quantitative ecologist, she uses mathematical models to figure out how nature works, particularly in the fields of community ecology, parasitology, disease ecology, and ecological scaling. She is also the Vertebrate Collections Manager in UVM’s Zadock Thompson Zoological Collections, where she works to make the collections accessible to researchers at UVM and beyond.

As a GTA in the Biology Department, Emily seeks to use the principles of universal design to ensure accessibility is built into every course she teaches. Together with Dr. Laura May Collado and GTA Maia Austin, she redesigned the Mammalogy lab from a primarily memorization-based course to a course that prioritizes career-relevant skills such as mammal specimen preparation, field techniques, and data literacy. She also designed and taught a 1-credit seminar, Introduction to R for Biologists, which provided students with the programming and data management skills needed to be competitive in the contemporary job market. She hopes to eventually become a professor at a research institution to balance her interests in research, mentoring, and teaching.