My principle training and professional development are in Ecological Genetics and Biotechnology. I have developed new courses in Genomics, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology in addition to my main teaching assignment, which is Genetics. I have also developed courses in Plant Population Biology and Plant Ecology (community ecology). I have taught freshman biology to both majors and non majors. I have attended meetings and presented my ideas about undergraduate education to The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and The American Institute of Biological Sciences. I have attended meetings and worksops related to teaching or research and presented student research at The Ecological Society of America and The Botanical Society of America. I have also attended and presented workshops at the Mississippi Science Teachers Association (MSTA). I have been chair/vice Chair of the Division of Cellular, Molecular and Developmental Biosciences and the History of Science Division at the Mississippi Academy of Sciences. I have been a CUR councilor and a member of the Education Committee of The Ecological Society of America.
My basic research interest is ecological genetics. I look at both molecular and morphological characters. The molecular characters I prefer are allozymes/isozymes and RAPDs. RAPDs have proven to be far more useful than some others have suggested. As well as being highly repeatable by myself, undergraduate students and high school teachers and students, RAPDs fragments are easily cloned and sequenced, yielding Sequence Tagged Site (STS) markers. No other method is technically so easy that anyone can use it, and yet can yield so much high quality data for species where molecular markers are otherwise very rare to absent altogether. I have also investigated silk proteins in Caddis Fly larvae and variation amongst Daffodil cultivars.
I have mentored 54 independent student research projects, including 12 by high school students, 14 by high school teachers and 21 by undergraduates. One of the high school teachers I mentored completed a research masters degree. Five undergraduate research projects were completed honors projects. A sixth student enrolled in honors for one semester, but did not continue with honors, although he completed his assigned research project. I have also mentored 7 research projects for masters level students who were not high school teachers.
I have had my work presented 34 times at national and regional meetings. My presentations included 15 different student authors, with student authors themselves making the presentations of their work. I have published 19 articles in the peer reviewed literature, including 7 student authors. I have conducted 9 workshops at national and regional meetings on the general topic of undergraduate education. I have published 11 DNA sequences, including 5 that were published as part of the research laboratory portion of my molecular biology course. Twenty-two molecular biology students are listed as authors for the 5 DNA sequences published as part of the molecular biology research laboratory.
I have participated in 5 grants, including 3 from The National Science Foundation (NSF), 1 from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and one from a private society. I was Principal Investigator on 2 of the NSF grants and co Principal Investigatopr on the third. My NSF grants generated $75, 494.00 which were matched by the college administration, except for the computer laboratory grant, which was matched from alumni funds, with all funds applied to the improvement of instructional facilities at Mississippi College. I was also a major author and participant in our HHMI grant, writing the component related to molecular biology and some of the outreach. I mentored 6 of the 12 high school student/high school teacher researchers and 2 of the undergraduate student researchers. I developed and delivered the workshops on molecular biology for high school teachers. I directed workshops and mentored workshop participants in the development of workshop presentations on molecular biology for the MSTA. I also conceived of, designed and oversaw the construction of a new molecular biology laboratory as part of the HHMI grant.
I have hosted the Mississippi Junior Academy of sciences at Mississippi College and worked with a local high school teacher to develop a research conference for high school students. I have conducted molecular biology laboratories in high school classes in support of high school teachers.