I am an Assistant Professor of Anatomy at the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences (OSU-CHS).

I co-teach Clinical Gross Anatomy for Osteopathic Medical, Physician Assistant, and Biomedical Graduate students, and I teach in the Anatomy and Vertebrate Paleontology track graduate program.

For AVP track students, I teach in the Advanced Vertebrate Paleontology course on primate origins and on the Pleistocene through "Anthropocene" faunal record and extinctions. In my Evolution and Functional Morphology graduate seminar, the course aim is to survey the theoretical frameworks that ground and validate modern functional morphological investigations, situating current methods within the intellectual history of the field. These courses build on a broader teaching career that has included Biological Anthropology, Primatology, Evolutionary Anatomy, Forensic Anthropology, and Field Paleontology at the University of Arkansas, Brooklyn College, and Tulane University.
 

In the Clinical Anatomy course, our graduate AVP and clinical students have different needs, and instruction must support the growth of both cohorts. My approach incorporates both evolutionary and clinical framing to build context and significance for the subject, scaling the relative emphasis to the needs and educational goals of each group. In both cases I blend narrative instruction with a Socratic questioning approach, moving students from identification of structures toward application and functional or clinical reasoning. For my lectures, I develop supplemental study materials including structured labeling exercises, board-style practice questions, gamification-based self-assessment tools, and case-based clinical narratives. These approaches reflect years of teaching clinical and biomedical students at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Central Michigan University College of Medicine, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

 

Outgrowths from the anatomy lab include published research with medical student co-authors: a study on the use of cadaveric dissection to support self-directed clinical learning (Kuo et al.) and work on surgically-significant anatomical variation (Hunt et al.). The latter, published in Scientific Reports, includes student-produced reference illustrations developed to expand representation of diverse populations in clinical anatomy reference materials.

 

Further afield, I enjoy working with students and mentees beyond the classroom and laboratory, through field research courses in primatology in Nicaragua and Caribbean paleontology in the Dominican Republic, and through outreach programs such as the Native Explorers Program, run through the OSU Office of American Indians in Medicine and Science.