Assistant Professor
B.S., Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle
Ph.D., Geophysical Sciences, 2003, The University of Chicago
Office: UW2-220
Phone: 425.352.3666
Email: rprice@uwb.edu
Website: http://faculty.washington.edu/beccap/
Mailing: Box 358511, 11136 NE 180th Street, Bothell, WA 98011-1713
Teaching
I aim to provide a dynamic and interdisciplinary perspective of the natural world. Class time is an opportunity to capture students' interest, and I constantly adjust my approach to ensure that they are engaged. We use discussions, writing assignments, presentations, laboratory activities, and field trips to learn the material, working together and learning as a team. Course assignments offer the opportunity for me to judge student performance, but also for me to evaluate my effectiveness as an instructor so that I can improve. The most rewarding part of teaching is when students understand a topic that had been intimidating; they become proud, confident, and interested.
Recent Courses Taught
BES 200 Introductory Biology
BCUSP 104/BCUSP 110 Discovery Core I: Growing Things (with Kory Perigo)
BCUSP 140 Scientific Journeys
BIS 381 History of Life
BIS 382 The Visual Art of Biology
Research/Scholarship
I study how species change shape over geologic time scales. Do these changes result from the same evolutionary processes that occur in populations? Population biologists generally accept that they do, but paleobiologists remain unconvinced that population-level dynamics can explain phenomena like mass extinctions and adaptive radiations involving hundreds of species. The interplay between small and large scales of evolution must be reconciled to understand the processes that formed Earth's biological history, the stability of ecosystems, and the consequences of anthropogenic changes.
Because I study many geologic and geographic localities, I collect data from museum collections, the literature, and occasionally live specimens. Most of my work involves sea shells from a group of snails found throughout the world's oceans and with a rich fossil record extending back at least 140 million years. Earlier research projects studied the function of different shell features (Price, 2003, Biol Bull), the effect of biases in the fossil record (Jablonski et al., 2003, Science), the evolutionary history of a group of sea slugs (Price et al., in prep.), and the morphological changes in neogastropods over the last 140 million years (Price, in prep.).
Presentations
"Emersion limits short-term growth rates in interdial Nucella Lamellosa." Society of Integative and Comparative Biolgoy Annual Meeting & Exhibition, Seattle, 2009.