Academics

Teaching

My goals in teaching are to nurture students with the basic concepts and learning skills in human genetics/epigenetics that facilitate learning and critical thinking. The main component of teaching graduate students is to equip them with critical thinking, evaluation skills, opinion building, verbal and writing skills. To achieve my goals, I adopt interactive teaching, in which students are involved in reading textbooks, research and review articles, and preparing questions from daily reading, along with active class discussion, paper writing, class presentation, and hands-on experience in the Human Genetics Lab. My teaching activities include the primary responsibility of three courses per year to the graduate students in the Child Language Doctoral program. Courses include:

  1. Concepts in Human Molecular Genetics;
  2. Principles for the Study of Genetic Disorders and
  3. Epigenetics of Behavioral and Developmental Disorders. In our current technologically-focused world, we are seeing an immense growth of research, understanding, awareness, and application of the fields of Human Genetics, Genomics, and Epigenetics. I encourage students to think, evaluate, criticize, question, and discuss ideas during the class to be well informed about developments in human genetics and epigenetics.

Advanced reading is the primary and integral part of my classroom teaching. I expect my students to complete advanced reading from textbooks, research articles, review articles, and online resources like Google and YouTube. I ask students to send me at least two questions from reading in each class. I sometimes use material from peer-reviewed articles to explain the concept. As an example, students read a scientific paper published in Science that described how investigators found a DNA mutation in the MYO15 gene in hearing-impaired families, leading to a new understanding of the role of the product of this gene in hearing. We discussed the methodologies and the workflow that authors used in this study in a class of Principles for the Study of Genetic Disorders. We used figures from the paper and talked about their findings in the context of study design and methodologies used in their study. Such examples in my class enabled students to better understand the techniques they learned in the classroom and to develop an understanding of how science is conducted at the highest levels. I encourage students to find the latest research developments on the topics we are learning in class and to start discussions on these in class.

I assign students to write three papers in each course. I allot the paper topics in the class or allow students to choose a topic, which I then approve. The paper topics are designed to develop their abilities to do research on the topic and to strengthen their understanding of important concepts in the area. I encourage students to take advantage of the writing center on campus. Presentation skills are an important component of graduate education. A 30-minute class presentation is mandatory for students in my class. For this, I provide students an opportunity to review research articles on the presentation topic and demonstrate research methodologies and results.

Teaching Interests

I am currently involved in teaching graduate-level courses in human genetics. Courses in genetics will particularly focus on the basic knowledge in Human Genetics, advancements in genetics, and molecular tools to study genetic disorders. Students from diverse academic backgrounds enroll in these courses. By taking these courses, students can build their career in human genetics or design a project to study genetics in their graduate research. I am also interested to teach courses in clinical molecular genetics, genomics, and precision medicine.

CLP964 Spring 2016: Concepts in Human Molecular Genetics

CLP880 Fall 2016: Concepts in Human Molecular Genetics

CLP964 Fall 2016: Principles of Genetic Studies in Human Genetic Disorders

Lab Expertise and Equipment

Genetic mapping of human phenotypes

Pedigree analysis

Linkage analysis/gene mapping

The study of copy number variations

Microarray

Sanger sequencing equipment

Next-generation sequencing