Justin Walguarnery

Professor of Biology in the School of Life Sciences, Dr. Justin Walguarnery, has rarely had a semester he felt he could merely do what had been done before. “Science by its very nature necessarily entails doing what has never been done and always exceeding your previous understanding, so it’s only ever made sense to me to do the same in my teaching of science.” To bridge practice to theory, he is acquiring courses in a third graduate degree in Educational Psychology in areas of cultural influences, cognition and qualitative research methods. He meets his students as equals with full respect of where they’ve come from and where they are going, and each student is an active collaborator. In the words of one student, “There was an inherent freedom of thought and the support and implementation to actually make it work.” His hands-on lab course taught throughout the pandemic “resulted in the highest exam averages ever with half the time in lab under COVID conditions without reducing course content or compromising high standards.”