Courses Offered

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star”
Friedrich Nietzsche

Introduction to Organismal Form and Function (BIO 162)
This is the course within our introductory series that students tell us is the most intense!  In this course we expose students to the fundamentals of animal and plant physiology: The lecture focuses on mechanisms, and the laboratory introduces students to structures and their function. Together they provide a complementary picture of how plants and animals function.  I cover the animal part of the lecture: the importance of various tissues, energy expenditure, thermoregulation, digestion, gas exchange, circulatory systems, salt and water balance, endocrinology, reproduction, nervous system, sensory processes and movement.  You can tell that this is a very challenging scope to cover due to the such a wide range of topics at various levels of detail.  Our introductory series provides a complete overview of biology from biodiversity, molecular and cellular, to organismal biology, and finally ecology and evolution. [Syllabus (pdf)] • [Sample lecture (pdf)]

Principles of Physiology (BIO 361)
“Learn by doing” is the pedagogical motto at Cal Poly.  Students have two labs each week in this class and learn to document the experiments and analyze the results.  The lectures cover topics of cellular physiology: transport of solutes, aerobic and anaerobic energy metabolism, temperature adaptations, neurons, synapses, sensory processes, and muscle physiology.  Students learn to approach biological problems with tools from different scientific disciplines by integrating biochemical, physicochemical, mathematical, cellular as well as whole organismal and ecological approaches.  Often it is not the specific example that is important, but the complexity of the problem and its solution that develops students’ abilities to solve difficult problems.. 

Example Topic: The Transcriptional Regulatory Model for the Heat Shock Response

[Syllabus (pdf)] • [Sample lecture (pdf)]

Integrative Systems and Stress Physiology (BIO 502)
Integrative Systems Physiology deals with three fundamental aspects of physiological processes: the cellular basis of physiological processes, the integration of these processes at an organismal level and the dependence of these processes on the evolutionary history and ecology of an organism. In the laboratory, graduate students learn to study physiological stress by analyzing proteins using proteomics (see The Proteomic Workflow).   [Syllabus (pdf)]

Biology, Philosophy and the Concept of Freedom – Graduate Seminar (BIO 590)
The main purpose of this seminar is to think about the unifying conceptual issues in biology, specifically the evolutionary process and the basics of an algorithmic process that drives evolutionary progress.  We normally read chapters out of Daniel Dennett’s book “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” and debate the merits of scientific thinking in understanding the evolution versus creation world views.  We have read chapters out of “Theory and Reality” by Peter Godfrey-Smith, an introduction to the philosophy of science, to understand the scientific process.  This is a relatively easy introduction into philosophy and helps students to reflect on their own scientific thinking (induction, deduction, falsification, paradigm shifts, etc.).  We also approach an even more difficult question: How can we develop a biological concept of freedom?  We discuss this topic by reading chapters out of “Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life” by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb.  Hopefully, we will be able to reconcile a biological understanding of freedom with the humanities assertion of freedom.  The specific outcome is open and will depend on the participation of students in debating these issues.