How instructors plug in
Graduate students, postdocs, staff, alumni, and faculty help teach bench work, troubleshoot experiments, guide bioinformatics sessions, and support poster preparation.
For instructors.
Community Phages is taught by a rotating group of faculty, graduate students, postdocs, staff, alumni, and partner instructors. Mentors teach bench work, troubleshoot experiments, guide bioinformatics, and help students prepare posters.
What instructors help students do.
Instructors keep students safe at the bench, explain protocols, help troubleshoot experiments, and support final posters.
Instructor materials
Protocols, bioinformatics chapters, Day 1 notes, lab notebook guidance, glossary, schedule context, and instructor references.
What students need from mentors
Clear instructions, patient troubleshooting, help connecting experiments to phage biology, and support turning raw observations into poster figures and claims.
Instructor work by week.
Early weeks are heavy on bench orientation. Mid-summer shifts toward troubleshooting, microscopy, DNA work, and bioinformatics. The end of the program is about figures, interpretation, practice talks, and poster presentations.
1
Teach the method
Walk students through pipetting, aseptic technique, plate setup, sample handling, and notebook expectations.
2
Troubleshoot the result
Help students read lawns and plaques, decide what to repeat, and interpret ambiguous results.
3
Connect data to biology
Bring in phage structure, host range, bacterial defenses, genome annotation, and comparison to known phages.
4
Support the poster
Help students choose figures, write claims they can defend, and practice explaining their isolate to an audience.
Instructor materials.
Protocols, bioinformatics chapters, Day 1 notes, notebook instructions, glossary, and instructor references.
Bench
Lab protocols
Project introduction, pipetting, basic technique, sampling, direct plating, enrichments, purification, lysates, DNA extraction, restriction digest, killing experiments, and host range.
Computational
Bioinformatics
Introductory sequence work, whole phage genome assembly, annotation, BLAST context, and genome figures.
Teaching
Student materials
Lab checklist, notebook guidance, glossary, program schedule, people, and discoveries.
Questions about teaching?
Questions about teaching, schedules, or public materials.