brian avery (a.k.a. the nerdcommander)

My goal is to support student learning in a collaborative, active, and experiential style with a focus on data gathering, data analysis, and reading and understanding primary literature. I have created many courses as well as large collections of lab and classroom activities.

Over the years that I have been at Westminster, I have mentored dozens of undergraduate research students. Many of these students have continued their studies in graduate and professional programs. My students and I are interested in studying genetic diversity and how it affects the phenotypes of various organisms. For the last few years, we have concentrated on how genetic variation can affect complex behaviors in humans such as anxiety (in collaboration with my neuroscience colleagues) and the population genetics of the brine shrimp, Artemia, from Great Salt Lake in UT. We do our best to share our work through local, regional, and national conference presentations as well as the occasional publication.

Recently, I have revived my interest in computer science and taken a liking to the statistical analysis of data, which has led me to be involved our new data science program and start teaching with R and Python.