Teaching
Dr. Sarah Woolley teaches three courses (both undergraduate and graduate-level) and participates in some other team-taught graduate seminars.
Undergraduate Courses
Animal Behavior
Lecture Course. This course is an introduction to animal behavior, approached at both the ultimate (why) and proximate (how) levels. The study of animal behavior seeks to explain how animals interact with the physical environment and each other in ways that promote fitness the successful passing of genes to the next generation). It also uses the principles of evolution through natural selection to understand why behaviors such as communication and sexual selection are adaptive, how they may have evolved and how the brain controls them. Although the study of animal behavior is most closely tied with the fields of behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology, organismal biology, psychology, and neuroscience, the understanding of how and why animals behave as they do will benefit any student.
Auditory Perception
Seminar. How does the human brain make sense of the acoustic world? What properties of sound are important for the discrimination and recognition of sounds with specific meaning? What aspects of auditory perception do humans share with other animals? How does the brain perform the computations necessary for skills such as sound localization? How do we focus our auditory attention on one voice in a crowd? What acoustic cues are important for speech perception? What's special about music? We will address these questions and more by studying the basics of auditory perception in a textbook and reading classic and current literature to understand the scientific progress in the field today. Our reading of the literature will be critical, with a focus on good scientific design.
Graduate Courses
Communicating in Science
Seminar. Scientific progress depends on understanding each other, both in writing and in discussion/oral presentation. Today's scientists are required to communicate their ideas, studies, and findings with clarity and excitement. The skills required for good communication require practice and mentorship to develop fully. This course formalizes that practice and supervision by having each student write one grant or paper and give oral presentations several times, responding to critiques over the course of the semester. I will present strengths and mistakes of writing and presentation. We will select and share examples of particularly well and poorly-written documents. Each student will then write her/his own document, in a series of drafts, with repeated feedback from me. Each student will give an oral presentation, several times over the semester, responding to the critiques of the class. In this way, students will make a concentrated effort to develop/improve their scientific communication skills.
Behavioral Neuroscience
Team-taught Seminar. Behavioral neuroscience is a growing field of scientific knowledge and research. We will give graduate students interested in the neural basis of behavior an overview of what is known about how the brain acts to control behavior, including 1) the organization of the CNS; 2) how neurons work; 3) how neural circuits are formed; 4) how neurons communicate; 5) how functional systems work; 6) the neural underpinnings of learning and memory; 7) how drugs act on the brain, and 8) how cognitive processes and complex learning are accomplished in the brain.
