# Teaching

Dustin Edwards leads the Department of Biological Sciences at Tarleton State University as Department Head, and teaches the two course-based research courses of the HHMI SEA-PHAGES program there, one per semester. In them, undergraduates isolate, name, sequence and analyze viruses that infect bacteria. This page gives his teaching philosophy, lists those courses and the tutorials, and explains how undergraduates join the lab for research. The earlier lecture-course pages (virology, genetics, vaccines, cell biology) have been retired and now point here.

## Teaching philosophy

Authentic, mentored research is a transformative, high-impact experience for undergraduates, and the teaching here is built around it. Rather than reserving research for a few students in a faculty lab, the courses put real research questions into the regular curriculum, so every enrolled student does research. Students isolate and characterize new phages, work whose results no one knows in advance. Their phages go into a shared national database, and sequenced genomes are written up as genome announcements the students co-author. How courses like these are taught and assessed is also a subject of Dustin's research, described on the [science education](/research/science-education) page.

## Courses

### Phage Discovery Program

The [Phage Discovery Program](/teaching/phage-discovery) is Tarleton's part of [SEA-PHAGES](https://seaphages.org/), a national collaboration in bacteriophage genomics run by the Science Education Alliance at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) with a team at the University of Pittsburgh. It is a two-semester set of discovery-based undergraduate research courses, both taught as Special Topics (BIOL 4090).

### Virus Isolation Course

The [Virus Isolation Course](/teaching/virus-isolation) is the first semester. Students collect soil or water samples, isolate and purify bacteriophages, image them by electron microscopy and extract their DNA for sequencing.

### Phage Bioinformatics course

The [Phage Bioinformatics course](/teaching/phage-bioinformatics) is the second semester. Students annotate the whole genomes of the phages sequenced from the first semester.

## Tutorials

The [Central Dogma Tutorials](/teaching/central-dogma) cover the molecular biology processes of encoding genetic information from DNA to mRNA to proteins.

The [Study Skills Guide](/teaching/study-skills) covers learning styles and what research says about studying by learning style.

## Join the lab

Undergraduates can do research in the lab beyond the courses. Authentic, mentored undergraduate research is a transformative, high-impact experience: it connects classroom theories to actual practice, teaches valuable laboratory techniques, develops critical analysis skills, and trains students in scientific writing and presentation. Students who finish both SEA-PHAGES courses can keep characterizing their own phages as independent research. Current projects are on the [research](/research) page, and contact details are on the [about](/about) page.

### What to expect

Research in the lab carries more responsibilities than a course. Projects that involve animals or human subjects must first be approved by Tarleton's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB). All work follows The Texas A&M University System policies and regulations, Tarleton State University rules and procedures, and state and federal laws and regulations. Before starting, a new researcher needs:

- **Training.** The courses the project requires, with training records kept current.
  - [CITI Program](https://about.citiprogram.org/), valid for three years: Responsible Conduct of Research, Wildlife Research, and Social and Behavioral Research.
  - Texas A&M University System [TrainTraq](https://traintraq.tamus.edu/), valid for one year: Lab Safety and Bloodborne Pathogens Online Training.
- **Lab access.** The research lab has restricted, logged swipe-card entry and keys for specific equipment and chemicals. Unauthorized entry is prohibited. Swipe-card access must be approved by Dr. Dustin Edwards and by the Dean of the College of Science and Technology. After-hours access needs the same approvals and registration with the Tarleton State University Police Department.

### Reporting a concern

Concerns about the welfare or ethical treatment of research animals go to Tarleton's IACUC office.