Teaching is fun. It has always been fun. Throughout my life, I have been enjoying sharing my enthusiasm for certain activities with people, such as teaching kayaking or free diving.

When biology took a predominant place in my life, it was only a natural progression for me to want to teach it to others. I take my passion into the classroom, where I use it to reach students, and to make them a participatory component of my teaching experience. Making students eager to learn, or excited about a project or a topic, or amazed at what life is all about, is what makes my day, my semester and my life. My hope is that through my teaching and through my enthusiasm students learn to appreciate nature, and to become more aware of their environment and more informed as citizens.

I obtained my degree in biology in the University of Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy, where I worked in aquaculture and marine biology. I am now pursuing a Ph.D. in biology and plankton ecology at UWM, where my research interests span from seaweed ecology in the Pacific Northwest, to plankton interactions in urban ponds. I am now in the phase of writing the dissertation, with some of my research work already published in one of the major phycological scholarly journal (Murru and Sandgren, October 2004). Writing and running statistical analyses does not leave me much free time, although I stubbornly attempt to get involved in extracurricular activities like kayaking or learning archery with a handmade longbow.

View scientific work by Maurizio Murru.