Teaching
My goal as an educator and mentor is to engage students in the scientific process, foster critical thinking, and connect methods to meaningful ecological questions. I use hands-on, field-based, and flipped-classroom strategies to support learning and increase inclusion in STEM.
Metabolomics Workshops
I’ve developed and taught short, immersive courses that train early-career researchers to bring untargeted metabolomics into ecological research programs. These workshops emphasize experimental design, sample prep, LC-MS/MS acquisition, data processing, and ecological interpretation.
Three recent workshops
- Quito, Ecuador (2019) — Spanish-language plant metabolomics intensive.
- Nairobi, Kenya (ICIPE, 2022) — English workshop with wet lab + GNPS/Metabo workflows. Materials: GitHub repo.
- Panama (STRI, 2023) — Spanish-language, ecology-driven ecometabolomics module.
Collectively, these trainings have reached 40+ participants from eight countries and helped launch new metabolomics projects in ecology and evolution.
Tools for Teaching & Research: eCOMET (R)
Building on recurring workshop curricula and common analysis needs, I am working with a team to develop eCOMET, an R package designed to streamline ecometabolomics workflows—from data ingestion and feature curation to visualization and ecological modeling.
The beta version of eCOMET is available here: phytoecia.github.io/eCOMET. It is active, pre-publication software (documentation and APIs may change), and we welcome feedback from students and collaborators who are using it for teaching or research.