Teaching
Courses, supervision, and how I think about teaching
Giuliano Colosimo 
I regard education as a transformative process: one that shares knowledge on one side and inspires curiosity, a passion for learning, and critical thinking on the other. Good teaching is reciprocal — a constructive and respectful exchange between students and instructor, built on mutual trust.
I am a committed advocate of active learning. Rather than have students passively receive content, I build my courses around group discussion, case studies drawn from the primary literature, problem-solving exercises, and hands-on work. This comes naturally in my field: ecology is a quantitative, data-rich science, and I want students to move confidently from field observations and raw data to inference — and to do so reproducibly. In practice that means teaching not only ecological concepts but the computational and statistical literacy that modern ecology demands, so students leave able to analyse their own data.
I have taught in both English and Italian, and all of my teaching can be delivered in English.
Instructor of record
Master’s-level courses at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, each designed from the ground up and refined over successive years in response to student feedback.
The course I have found most rewarding to teach. Because I designed it originally, I have been able to adapt it continuously — when students showed strong interest in conservation technology, an area central to my own research, I added dedicated sessions on it, along with a module on conservation economics and the challenge of assigning economic value to ecosystem services.
Curated and developed over four years, covering the fundamentals of movement ecology: foundational concepts of animal movement, tracking devices, GIS and mapping, and the analytical frameworks that turn raw movement data into biologically and conservation-relevant information.
Guest lectures and seminars
Earlier teaching
Coordinated the design and delivery of the laboratory and seminar components for General Biology, Human Anatomy and Comparative Anatomy.
A programme led by Prof. Mark Welch and overseen by Prof. Gabriele Gentile.
Supervision
I have supervised and mentored more than ten bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral candidates. Many are co-authors on our joint publications, which reflects how I approach supervision: students work on real questions, with real data, and the output is real science. Recent completions:
One analysing data we collected together during Galapagos fieldwork; the other a four-month research internship in Rome.
The master’s thesis was completed with honours.
I have also acted as external supervisor for master’s and doctoral projects at Mississippi State University and the University of Leeds.
Teaching material
I am a strong advocate of accessible knowledge. I build course material online and make it freely available to my students, in open course companions where they can review material, download slides, and find the references discussed in class.
- Animal Tracking in Conservation Biology — the full course companion: session-by-session material, the R exercises, and the schedule.
- Conservation Biology — course outline, topics covered, and the reading list.
I co-authored Un Viaggio nell’ambiente R (Russo, Colosimo, et al., University of Rome Tor Vergata Publishing Service, 2026), a textbook for students meeting the R programming environment for the first time. I curated the chapter on using R for the analysis of genetic and genomic data. It is listed on the publications page.