Mikelle Nuwer is an associate teaching professor in the UW School of Oceanography, where she introduces more than 600 students a year to the field of marine sciences. Specifically, her classes look at the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest, the physics and chemistry of coastal waters, and marine food webs and ecology. She is a current member of the UW College of the Environment’s Teaching Support Team, a former lead and coach for the Evidence-Based Teaching Program and a former Teaching Technology Fellow. She holds a M.S. and Ph.D. in biological oceanography from UW, where her dissertation work focused on the spatial and temporal patterns of molecular genetic variation in a group of planktonic calanoid copepods.