Mike Wiser (he/him)

Assistant Professor

At my core, I'm an evolutionary biologist. The majority of my wetlab research, dating back to my undergrad days, has been microbiological, so I'm pretty comfortable in the world of the very small. And as evolution and ecology are inherently concerned with comparing observed results to mathematical models, I have a substantial amount of practice with advanced statistics in R. As an undergraduate, I double majored in Biochemistry and in Psychobiology (a program later renamed at that university as Neuroscience), so I have a grounding in molecular techniques as well.

I joined the BioSci faculty in 2019, after turning down a couple of research-based tenure track job offers as I was fundamentally more interested in teaching. One of the best parts of being able to focus more on the teaching angle is seeing the look of dawning comprehension, as students realize that a particular topic is not as difficult as they previously thought it was.

If I'm running my help hours on Zoom from home, you're quite likely to see an appearance of at least one of my cats.

PhD, Michigan State University, MS Stanford; BS, University of Southern California