DR. MINCHELLA'S COURSES

BIOL 115: BIOLOGY RESOURCE SEMINAR
    The course is designed to help integrate new biology students into the Department of Biological Sciences, to help them adjust to university life, and to assist them in developing academic and intellectual survival skills using the medium of Biology 121 problem sets. The course meets once a week in groups of 20-25 students. Each section is led by an academic advisor and an undergraduate teaching intern. The class periods have an on-going emphasis on connecting students to one another as resources while learning information, critical thinking skills and problem-solving strategies. Topics include an introduction to Purdue's computer system, ethics, time management, and career development. Students are exposed to opportunities in undergraduate research, summer internships, the study abroad program, and teaching internships. Throughout the course, students are encouraged to plan their college education rather than merely
choose their courses.

BIOL 121: DIVERSITY, ECOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR
    An overview of the unity and diversity of life. We attempt to construct a framework for ordering biology by studying both the shared and specialized modificatinos of organisms that allow them to adapt to their environment. We also apply bilogical principles to social, medical and environmental issues. Topics include: diversity of life, respiration, photosynthesis, mitosis/meiosis, Mendelian genetics and complications, natural selection, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, population growth (including humans), interactions among populations (competition, predation, parasitism), biological and genetic control, behavior, and conservaiton biology.

BIOL 542E : ECOLOGICAL PARASITOLOGY
    Parasites make up over 50% of the organisms on earth, yet they remain relatively unrecognized in the biological sciences. This course is designed to introduce students to the complex and bizarre world of parasitism, and to familiarize students with the important ecological factors that have allowed parasites to become so prolific. Topics addressed in this course include disease transmission, host specificity, parasite-induced morbidity/mortality, and host resistance. Labs will complement lecture topics and will incorporate molecular techniques, whole-organism experiments and field collections. As part of the lab component, students will also be exposed to standard statistical procedures. This course will emphasize concepts using parasites from the protozoa through to the arthropoda.