COURSES | academic

Organization of Life: Genetics and Cell Bio

My goal in this course is to introduce students to the wonderful world that exists inside the cell and to get them excited to start their collegiate career as scientists.

Neurobiology

This is perhaps my favorite course to teach. We cover neuroscience at all levels, from cells to circuits to behavior. I use a variety of texts for this class, but draw most of the basic material from Bear's Neuroscience or Watson and Breedlove's Mind's Machine.

Neurobiology of Stress

I love this course! In this class I get to teach mainly non-science students about the brain. First we ask some big-picture questions about the nature of persons, and then we dig into the basics of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and the stress response system. From there we cover several basic behaviors that are relevant to student's lives and are affected by stress (e.g., metabolism, sleep, immunity, pain) before concluding the class with a section on how to build resilience.

Cell and Developmental Biology

Cells are insane! That is the matra for this course. We start with an in-depth exploration of the inner workings of the cell, explore how cells develop into multi-cellular organisms next, and then spend the last few weeks discussion recent bioethical issues.

Course Previously Taught

Introduction to Epidemiology

My goal is this course is to help students understand how to use epidemiological tools to explore public health questions. We start by studying the basics of the epidemiological approach, spend a good bit of time learning about the various study designs that epidemiologists use to determine the cause of a disease, and end the course by using the worlds newest pandemic, physical inactivity, to apply what has been learned.

Dr. Thom has an ongoing collaboration with the DuPage County Health Department group, FORWARD where he studies obesity and overweight trends among youth in DuPage County.

Clinical Kinesiology

We were made to move! In this course, we start by exploring the kinetics, kinematics, CNS control, and properties of muscle that allow us to perform the myriad of motions that the human body can perform. We take a quick look at life without movement by exploring the MPTP story and then dive into an in-depth study of the upper and lower segments of the body. Finally, we synthesize the whole course as we explore several activities of daily living as well as sports-related movement.

Dr. Thom has an on-going collaboration with Dr. Scott Arnett at the University of Western Kentucky in which Wheaton students are given the opportunity to explore lower extremity biomechanics during sports movement.