Faculty Profile for Dr. Andrea Aspbury

Biography Section

Biography and Education

I completed my undergraduate degree (BS) in Biology at the University of Arizona in 1994. In 1996 I completed my MS in Biological Sciences at Illinois State University. I received my PhD in Biological Sciences 2002 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In 2002 I began a postdoctoral position at Texas State University while also holding a Lecturer position at the University of Texas-Austin. In 2005 I was hired as Senior Lecturer at Texas State University.

Teaching Interests

Much of my teaching experience has been in teaching major’s introductory biology (Organismal Biology). This is a survey class that covers everything from Meiosis through Ecosystem and Global Biology. If you look at any textbook geared for these courses, you will see that they are organized in a hierarchy of biological organization; from cells to ecosystems. Most instructional methods approach learning this material in a linear fashion. However, I approach teaching the material in a much more integrated manner. Using case studies is one method to teach these topics in a more accessible manner to students. I use this method in the Honor’s section of the Organismal Biology course where I use the work of Drs. Rosemary and Peter Grant and their colleagues on the Darwin’s Finches of the Gálapagos islands as a case study to teach topics ranging from gene expression and gene regulation to population, behavioral and community ecology.

I also teach Animal Behavior, and encourage students to learn by completing their own independent research projects in this writing intensive course.

Research Interests

My research interests encompass addressing questions in behavioral and population ecology. I am particularly interested in research questions that can be analyzed on multiple scales. Multi-scale approaches are important because processes at lower spatial or temporal scales are not necessarily reflected at higher scales. Therefore, our understanding of a particular system is not complete with an understanding of the system dynamics at only one scale.

The issue of scale is one that is reflected in the interacting fields of population ecology and behavioral ecology. The approach of behavioral ecology is to focus on individuals in order to understand the adaptive significance of behaviors, whereas population ecologists focus on populations of interacting individuals to understand the processes that determine the abundance and distribution of species. These pursuits are logically linked because the behavior of individuals will impact the demographic rates of populations, and the patterns of abundance and distribution of populations can in turn affect the behavior of individuals. The usual behavioral ecology approach of focusing on individuals often neglects higher-scale spatial and temporal processes, whereas a higher scale population ecology approach may neglect underlying individual dynamics.

Within this framework, in collaboration with Dr. Caitlin Gabor, I have examined questions ranging from reproduction and physiological processes within individuals (e.g., sperm competition and stress hormones) to questions about landscape-level variation in behavior (e.g., variation in male mate choice). We have worked in a variety of animal systems to examine these questions.