I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated and inspired by the natural world. Now, as an ecologist, science educator, and illustrator, I strive to inspire others with a similar love and appreciation for science.
Today, I took my undergraduate biology majors from “Organismal Biology, Ecology, and Evolution” class (BIOL 111A) out to the Bolinas Field Station, and it was FANTASTIC! The primary focus of our visit was to get to know several phyla of Read more
News from the Bolinas Field Station: October 2026 Hello friends of the Bolinas Field Station, Thank you to everyone who joined us for our September 13 open house! More than 60 people came out, including members of the Bolinas community Read more
September 26, 2026
In my first semester teaching General Ecology at COM, I’ve got a small group (just 10 students), but they are AMAZING. Super engaged, super knowledgeable, and super fun – I’m really glad to be working with this group of students this semester. Unsurprisingly, our first trip of the semester was a fantastic day in the field at Abbott’s Lagoon. During the class meeting before our trip, we all made “predictions” about how many species of birds we would see (collectively). I guessed 24, and I was WAY off. (Keep reading to see just how wrong I was).
Note: this is a summary of our day. If you’d like to see more detail about all the things we saw, I made my field journal post on my personal blog, Edge of the Map: https://www.edge-of-the-map.com/2026/09/27/abbotts-lagoon/
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Today, we hosted some very special guests at the Bolinas Field Station: students from our MESA program, along with program director Nicole McIntyre and physics faculty member Marceline Bonilla.
(more…)Today, Dan and I put on our first “real” event – an Open House at the Bolinas Field Station. And IT WAS AMAZING! We had at least 60 people come through: folks from Bolinas and beyond, students and faculty from College of Marin and a couple of other institutions.
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We had an exciting delivery to the field station today: a whole bunch of whale bones!
(more…)Had a great time at the field station today when Dan and I hosted a Flex Session in Bolinas. All faculty at staff at the College of Marin are required to do a certain number of hours of professional development training every year, and for many employees, the bulk of these hours can be earned during Flex Week, which happens the week before instruction begins in both the Fall and Spring semesters. So, this year, Dan and I offered a Flex Session to give folks a chance to see the field station while earning flex credit for their visit.
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Had a very satisfying day out in Bolinas working with some folks from Marin County Parks and their volunteers. The county was hosting an restoration day, focusing on removing some of the huge quantity of non-native ice plant growing on Kent Island (which is out in the lagoon, right across from the field station). Afterwards, Dan and I opened up the field station so the parks staff and all the volunteers could come and meet the critters.
(more…)There are many online tools that can be used to support student learning, and this has become one of my new favorites. I use the online quiz platform Kahoot to host collaborative exam review sessions. In the past, I created Read more
In the fall semester of 2015, I began teaching Restoration Ecology at Sonoma State University (SSU). In that semester, students focused on envisioning sustainable goals for Copeland Creek, its inhabitants, and its surrounding environs. In future semesters, we built upon Read more