I appreciate the opportunities available in a university setting to interact with people in other fields and to learn about what they are doing. For example, in summer 2011, I spent several weeks at Brookhaven National Laboratory working with faculty and students from ACU’s physics department. I was able to build good working relationships with several faculty members from the department while assisting them in their research efforts.
I often eat lunch with other professors, both within my college and also broadly from other departments, and enjoy the opportunity to discuss a range of topics. In doing so, I discovered a shared interest with marketing professor Ryan Jessup, which led to a joint publication (Can There Be Too Much Choice?).
I find that co-teaching Honors colloquia provides excellent opportunity to teach a topic outside of my normal domain and also to observe and work with colleagues from other departments. I have taught four different Honors colloquia:
- Logic Puzzles, co-taught with Dwayne Towell (Computer Science) in fall 2012 – this colloquium challenged students with a broad spectrum of logic puzzles and looked at aspects common to all of them
- Programming the Zombie Robot Apocalypse, co-taught with Mike Daugherity (Physics) first in spring 2013 and then again in spring 2015 – this colloquium addressed topics like consciousness, free will and machine learning
- Collective Intelligence, co-taught with Rebecca Hunter (Biology) in spring 2014 – this colloquium considered forms of collective intelligence in natural and artificial occurrences, from eusocial insects to crowdsourcing
- Existence of God: Reason and Evidence, co-taught with Ryan Jessup (Marketing) in fall 2015 – this colloquium considered logical, philosophical, cultural and physical evidences for the existence of God