As a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant for Comparative Vertebrate Physiology Lab and Human Anatomy and Physiology Lab. I was fortunate for the opportunity to teach with Dr. Sarah Leupen and Dr. Jennifer Hughes, both of whom have greatly helped develop my teaching style and philosophy. Additionally, I have had developed and given lectures for an animal course, as well as a special topics in sexual selection course. In my current position as a postdoctoral ascociate at UMD, I am developing “Introduction to Python for Life Sciences”, a course geared towards biology students with minimal programming experience. The goal of this course is to give students the basic tools they need to be able to use python is a research setting. Moving forward, I hope to develop courses to increase the accessibility of mathematical biology to students who might otherwise feel intimidated by quantitative methods. As a theoretician working in a principally empirical lab, I have been able to discuss my work with students of differing levels of mathematical maturity. One advantage of ODE based models is that they can be built up from very simple foundations, where complexity is gradually incoporated, and intuition emphasized at every stage. I believe, this slow, interative approach to teaching mathematical topics can strongly reduce the intimidation that some students may feel with theoretical biology.