Dr. Kathryn Perez grew up living all over Texas, USA. She attended Angelo State University for her BS and MS degrees and the University of Alabama for her PhD where she was an NSF-IGERT fellow in Interdisciplinary Freshwater Sciences. She followed this with an NIH-IRACDA postdoctoral training fellowship which combined pedagogical training at the University of North Carolina, teaching at North Carolina Central, an HBCU, and a research laboratory at Duke University. She was then an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse before moving to the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Dr. Perez has two research areas, the evolution and ecology of snails and student learning of evolution. In the snail area, her work is currently focused on endangered cave and spring snails, providing the ecological and evolutionary data necessary for effective conservation. Dr. Perez teaches General Biology, Evolution, Biology Communications, Invertebrate Zoology, and Biometry and has taught most of those courses both online and in-person. She uses a variety of technological approaches in teaching such as extensive use of SoftChalk and Blackboard for delivery of content and assessments before, during, and after class. She also uses Acadly or iClicker for in-class personal response and Flip for video discussions.
Associate Director and Associate Professor
School of Integrative Biological and Chemical Sciences
Email:
kathryn.perez@utrgv.edu