Courses

Endocrinology
Bio 337—undergrad; Bio 381K—grad

This course is directed primarily at pre-medical, pre-health, and pre-graduate seniors. As such, the content is focused on integrating fundamental concepts (such as hormone release, hormone transport and receptor activation) into complex systems (such as reproduction), enabling students to move their way through more complex concepts (such as the pathophysiology of sex determination) with confidence. One of my primary goals in teaching is promoting critical thinking skills; toward this end I incorporate discussion of recent scientific work into the regular class lectures, and require active participation and discussion from all the students.

Lectures deal with primarily mammalian systems, but we will cover comparative animals a bit as well. Within each topic, we will focus on the pathophysiology of the system, i.e., what disease state results when hormone systems are not working properly.

Topics:

1. Structure and function of hormone systems: production, transport, and action
2. osmoregulation
3. thyroid function
4. growth and metabolism
5. stress
6. reproduction: female and male physiology; parturition, lactation and menopause; sexual differentiation and development; alternative reproductive strategies.

Physiological Ecology
(also Bio 337--undergrad; Bio 381K—grad)

This course is co-taught by Art Woods, Marcy Litvak, and myself. We teach it every other spring semester (2002, 2004, etc)

We will survey physiological mechanisms that allow plants and animals to occupy a wide variety of habitats. We will consider physiological responses to a number of abiotic factors, such as oxygen/carbon dioxide, temperature, salt/water, and nutrient availability. We will consider the ability of organisms to make short-term adjustments to variable local environments within their lifespan (acclimation), and also evolutionary adaptations to specific habitats such as tidal zones, deserts, boreal/polar regions, and tropical forests. This course will fill two holes in our current curriculum by giving both undergrads and graduate students an upper level physiology and ecology course option. By team teaching this course, we can give students a combined perspective from an invertebrate physiological ecologist (Woods), plant physiological ecologist (Litvak), and vertebrate environmental endocrinologist (Breuner)

Topics:

1. Global climate patterns and biome/species distributions
2. Gas Exchange: balancing CO2, H20, and O2 in metabolic processes
3. Energetics: allocation, storage, mobilization
4. Resource Acquisition: foraging strategies, patch dynamics, resource use efficiency (light, water, nutrients)
5. Reproduction: resource allocation under different life history strategies
6. Temperature: life cycle adaptations, endothermy vs. ectothermy, torpor, physiological and behavioral adaptations to variable temperatures
7. Osmoregulation and water balance
8. Summing it up: Global Processes and Global Change

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