Besides mentoring individuals, I also very much like to share my knowledge through teaching.
I nourish my lectures using up-to-date research results but also favour interactive learning and critical mind, a point I believe to be more essential than ever in a world where information access is not anymore the challenge but where its synthesis and filtering are.
I currently teach courses
to BSc and MSc students in Biology @ UCLouvain covering:
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Statistics for Biology
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Conservation Biology
I am proud my courses receive very positive assessments from students.
STATISTICAL PRINCIPLES
AND ANALYSIS OF BIOLOGICAL DATA
The student shall understand, and become able to use correctly and critically the principal methods for the statistical analysis of biological and environmental data. He/she perceives the relationship between experimental design and analysis model and the necessity of planning experiments ahead, and becomes familiar with computer-aided data analysis.
After completing this course, the student should master the basic methods for the analysis of biological data, be able to choose the analysis model and method best adapted to the design of simple factorial experiments, to analyse and interpret correctly the results of such experiments. They should be then able to further progress by themself and follow fruitfully advanced lectures on experimental design and data analysis.
BSc Biology students (3rd grade) (4 ECTS course)
BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION
The course emphasizes a multi-disciplinary approach to conservation biology integrating ecology, biogeography, genetics, to lead to a modelling approach. Then the course covers the applied aspect of this discipline, integrating a political and socio-economic thinking.
The course begins by defining the levels of biodiversity, its spatiotemporal variations and its current state. The peculiarity of the current extinction crisis is determined relative to the extinctions of the past. Then the various threats to biodiversity, caused by the human impacts on the environment, are detailed, with the associated risks to biodiversity and humanity. Follows an overview of approaches to conservation and management of territories and threatened species.
A visit to the UCLouvain research forest (Bois de Lauzelle) provides real world illustrations of the risks posed to biodiversity and some associated conservation and / or restoration approaches.
MSc Biology students (1st grade) (4 ECTS course)
SCIENTIFIC APPROACH IN BIOLOGY
BSc Biology students (1st grade) (6 ECTS course, partim)
The course develops several aspects of the scientific approach in biology: the deductive and inductive methods, acquiring and checking experimental and observational data, finding and analyzing scientific information. Emphasis is put on the development of critical thinking.
In this multi-teacher course, I specifically focus on the scientific data: through interactive activities, students explore the different sources of variation in data, learn how to properly develop ad-hoc data validation checks, how to visualize their data and perform descriptive statistics. I also supervise a practical project where students learn to develop and apply an experimental protocol.
