Office located in BioSciences West, 1041 E Lowell St, Room 408.

My lectures will cover Ecology and Animal Physiology.

I will be using the textbook LIFE-The Science of Biology/Eighth Edition.

My lectures correspond to Chapters 40 to 57 in the book. I will stick to the book content very closely, but this altogether represents a huge amount of material to be covered in my only seven lecture slots ! To make it feasible for me and digestible for you, we will not try to go through everything, rather we will focus on what is most important for you (considering what might be the future of your biology studies, like applying to Med School…) and most exciting for all of us.

This is fascinating biological science, and we will go through it with a « question based » approach : most of my slides will start with an important « master question », that the content of the slide is intended to answer in a clear, to-the-point manner.

Take each master question as a « practice question » and try to answer it without looking at the details of the slide. If you do not feel comfortable with the question, then look at the full slide and try to reconstruct the logic of the answer. If you feel that you still do not get it, are missing something… I suggest two fixes :

+ Use your book to find and read fully expanded explanations (my slides are only summaries).

+ Talk to your friends about it ! Work together ! Team effort always pay off.

Because our time together in the classroom is so limited, there will be some important points that we won’t have time to cover in class.

I will provide you with a list of points (as short as possible, i know how busy you are !) to study by yourself in the book. To help you and make it as easy and straightforward as possible, i will organize your homework just like i set up my slides : there will be questions, and you will have to learn the corresponding material in the book (i will give very precise hints at where to find it, in terms of pages and section numbers).

The assigned homework is as important as the lectures : the exam will include questions on the material covered in class as well as in your homework.

For each lecture, i will provide you with a selection of multiple-choice questions, at least 6 answered, and 4 unanswered. The questions will bear on the material covered in class (slides) and as homework. Most of the questions on the exam will be identical to or strongly inspired by these training questions.

At the start of each lecture, we will go together through the 4 unanswered quiz questions. If you miss a lecture or need help with these questions, please consider

+ asking your friends (team effort !),

+ coming to my office hours.

These suggested readings are listed just in case you fall in love with that topic and feel the eager desire for learning much more about it…

My job as a teacher is to extract from the book what is most important, to emphasize how different pieces of knowledge are related to each other, to explain the logics behind our study and our understanding of biological systems and phenomena.

The book is enormous, so the challenge for me is to help your way through this mountain of knowledge, in order to get you to understand and learn things quickly and painlessly !

I do not want our coursework to add any more material or work than is already offered by the book. This is why :

+ You may feel like taking advantage of the LIFE website, but this is by no means a requirement or necessity – just up to you !

+ All figures, animations, activities/tutorials that i will present in class come from the book or website.

+ All answered self-quiz questions come from the book.

+ All suggested readings are taken out of the book’s suggestions.

I have updated my initial syllabus to adjust the content of my lectures to what has been covered by Dr. S and Dr. H.

Book : Chapter 56

Book : Chapters 55, 57

Book : Chapters 40, 41, 48, 49

Book : Chapters 50, 51

Book : Chapters 42, 43

Book : Chapters 44, 46

Book : Chapters 45, 47, 53

All documents are posted in PDF format.

The « Slides » file will be uploaded the day before the lecture at the latest. Ideally, « Homework », « Self-quiz » and « Suggested readings » files will also be, but sometimes won’t be available until the day after the lecture (my apologies for the inconvenience if this were to happen).

Slides , Homework , Self-quiz , Suggested readings .