Behavioral
Disease ecology
teaching
Click HERE for a public summary of my teaching evaluations at the University of Florida. Search for "Keiser" under instructor name on the right.
Parasite Biodiversity
Spring immersion semester, even years
Parasites are diverse and present across every ecosystem on the planet. This course uses a hands-on approach to the study of parasite biodiversity across different hosts and environments. We use lab space on UF’s campus and several day trips and overnight field trips to habitats around Florida: coastal marine/estuarine, wetlands, Florida scrub, and forests.
We visit biological field stations, research facilities, biodiversity collections, and state parks. Students also read primary literature in the fields of parasitology and disease ecology as a group. Students develop individual research projects using a diversity of tools to discover and identify parasites in a host of their choosing.
Animal Behavior and Parasitism
Spring semester, odd years
This course aims to introduce students to the ways in which host behavior can influence infection risk and transmission potential of parasites. We will investigate how host behavior influences disease, how parasites can manipulate host behavior, and how host-parasite interactions are studied across levels of biological organization. We will cover diseases of wildlife, domesticated animals, and humans, and will use an integrative perspective on how human diseases are connected to wildlife and the environment.
Introduction to Animal Behavior Online
Fall semesters, intermittently
What do animals do and why do they do it? From physiological mechanisms to ecological consequences and evolutionary dynamics. This online course introduces students to the study of animal behavior with an active and problem-based learning approaches. Below, you can see some example of videos where we introduce students to ongoing animal behavior research in our lab. This course was designed by Stefanie Gazda.
Foundation of Biology Special Interest Lab: Host-Microbe Interactions
An HHMI-funded lab course at the University of Pittsburgh for incoming first-year students to familiarize themselves with the scientific method. We focused on host-microbe interactions in spiders, and published our work at the end of the semester in the journal Current Zoology with 20 undergraduate coauthors! Click the thumbnail to the right for a link to a PDF of the paper (Parks et al 2017).
Foundations of Biology Specialty Lab focusing on host-microbe interactions. Here, students are exposing spiders to field-collected cuticular bacteria to test for relationships between increased bacterial load and host behavior.