Alumni Café: Transforming Knowledge into Action in Undergraduate Life Sciences
Join us in-person or online for the next Alumni Café lecture taking place on Tuesday, April 16th at 6:00 PM ET featuring Professor Colleen Dockstader speaking on "Transforming Knowledge into Action in Undergraduate Life Sciences."
Discover how the Human Biology department at UofT equips life science students with the skills and confidence to be career-ready upon completing their undergraduate studies. In this lecture, Professor Dockstader, a Woodsworth alumna, will share insights from her early research and how it has influenced her recent initiatives to provide hands-on training to undergraduate students.
Laboratory courses adhere to defined protocols. However, this course-based training may not always imbue students with the necessary competence or confidence for employment opportunities, or continued education, in life sciences research. Professor Dockstader will reveal her latest discoveries in fostering hands-on competence and discuss the crucial understanding that competence and confidence work synergistically to ensure life science students are career-ready.
Professor Colleen Dockstader
Professor Dockstader is a Woodsworth alum from U of T’s Department of Psychology (Hons. BSc), Department of Medical Biophysics (PhD), and previous post-doctoral fellow and researcher at The Hospital for Sick Children (Neurosciences and Mental Health). While working in the psychiatry department as a post-doc, and subsequently as a researcher in the Paediatric Brain Tumour Program, she used neuroimaging to investigate how brain structure and function underlies cognition and behaviour.
In 2015, Professor Dockstader left SickKids to join the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Human Biology Program (HMB). In 2023 she became an Associate Professor, teaching stream. Her bench-to-bedside training has provided her with a breadth of research and teaching experience that she applies to create hands-on undergraduate training so that graduates may feel confident and competent in their technical life science skills, as well as transferable skills. She has developed courses (ie, JHA410 Clinical Neuroimaging) and extracurricular opportunities (ie, the HMB Lab Bootcamp) that directly provide students with the training needed to enter the workforce, or continue their education.
In 2023, Professor Colleen Dockstader joined University College as Director of the Health Studies Program where she hopes to create more hands-on opportunities for her students in the complementary field of public health.