Mingyu Yang

Research

My teaching and research are rooted in two broad questions: what should a modern biology curriculum teach, and how do students learn these things?

A current project explores how biology students develop mechanistic reasoning about chemical phenomena. Chemistry is a foundational subject in biology and pre-health curricula, but students often report challenges in building a coherent mental model of chemical principles. This challenge is exacerbated by the adoption of distinct disciplinary norms for explaining abstract concepts like bonding and energy, which can lead students to construct a fragmented understanding of these ideas. I examine how students conceptualize and visualize these crosscutting topics, and whether they encounter conflicting or contradictory explanations across their biology and chemistry courses. Ultimately, our goal is to develop visualizations and teaching tools that bridge the gap between chemistry and biology, contextualizing chemical principles to the life sciences.

I’m also passionate about equipping biology students with quantitative and computational skills. Biologists are increasingly dependent on programming and data science, however many are reliant on self-teaching these skills as the need arises. Relatedly, a one-size-fits-all introductory computer science course may not meet the discipline-specific needs of biology undergraduates. I work towards developing validated learning objectives for programming and data science to codify what technical skills a modern biology student should learn. I also explore the mindsets and self-beliefs that biology students hold about their programming and maths abilities, which I use to cultivate a growth-oriented culture in the quantitative courses I teach.