The Moorea Class takes students to the Gump Station on the island of Moorea, French Polynesia, for an immersive research experience. Students spend a few weeks in courses and training on the Berkeley campus before heading to Moorea for 9-weeks, where they are introduced to the diversity of habitats, flora, fauna and culture on Moorea. Then, working 6-days a week, students design, propose, conduct and communicate their own independent research on a topic of their choosing. Students live communally, sharing a dormitory building and cooking for each other. The course culminates back on the Berkeley campus, where students present their research during an all-day symposium that is open to the public. Final research papers are archived, and some have even been published.

This class presents a systems-approach to learning comparative physiology, following the textbook Animal Physiology by Hill, Wyse and Anderson (4th ed), with augmentation from other sources including the classic Biochemical Adaptation books by Hochachka and Somero. The class, which is presently taught as an online asynchronous class, guides students through topics in the textbook, fosters independent work on topics of interest to students in a term-project, and encourages peer-discussion of complex and real-world problems that apply the principles of animal physiology learned in the class.

BIOL630 Term Projects from this class are here.

This class is more about the process of conducting and communicating scientific research than it is about Animal Physiology. In the class, students conduct independent research on a topic of their choosing but that involves measurement of some physiological phenotype (e.g., thermal tolerance, respiration rates, etc..). Students write a proposal for their project, and in an NSF-style review process, they review each other's proposals. Following reviews, students perform their proposed project, and write a scientific manuscript to present their study, along with an oral conference-style presentation. Skills in data management, graphics, and statistical analyses in R are also taught. Presently this class is taught as an online asynchronous class.

In this class each week there is a lecture centered around a collection of recent articles from the primary literature about a topic in environmental physiology (e.g., warming & temperature stress, ocean acidification, ocean deoxygenation, pollution, etc...). Students are then assigned to read one of the articles on which the lecture was based, and in a Jigsaw format, discuss the article that they read with peers who read the same article, and then present the article they read with peers who read different articles. Students have a term-project in which they research on a topic in environmental physiology and present what they have learned orally to the class, as well as in writing their research as an article in a popular magazine of their choice (and in the process, learning about science communication).