{"id":24170,"date":"2026-05-04T02:42:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T06:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/?p=24170"},"modified":"2026-05-04T02:42:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T06:42:17","slug":"faculty-spotlight-martina-muller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/faculty-spotlight-martina-muller\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty Spotlight: Martina M\u00fcller"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Meet ATL’s Faculty Spotlight for May 2026, Martina M\u00fcller. A graduate of URI\u2019s wildlife and conservation biology program, Martina brings a global perspective shaped by more than a decade of field based research on seabirds in coastal ecosystems across five continents. Her diverse professional experiences in science, agriculture, advocacy, and local politics inform an interdisciplinary and inclusive teaching approach grounded in curiosity and critical thinking. Deeply committed to student growth, she is dedicated to preparing thoughtful, skilled scientists and field biologists ready to address complex environmental challenges with integrity and creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read her full interview below.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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What is your proudest teaching moment of the last year?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few weeks ago, one of my NRS 100 (Natural Resource Conservation) students had a real aha moment in the middle of an exam. The question contrasted Indigenous world views and early preservationist values of nature – and something clicked for her. She wrote me a long note in the margin of her multiple choice paper explaining the connection she’d just made. We were both excited about it. It does feel like this is the ultimate goal of what exams could be. Most of the time we treat them as the thing you do after<\/em> learning, but they can also be the thing where learning happens: students concentrate on the material with a focus they rarely bring to anything else for a solid hour. When that focus produces a genuine insight, it’s one of the best feelings in teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who is a teaching mentor that you have, and what did you learn from them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scott McWilliams, without question. He’s been my mentor since I was an undergrad in this department. I worked in his lab, was a CELS Summer Fellow with him, and co-published my first paper with him as an undergrad. After grad school and a postdoc abroad I came back to URI, and Scott is also the reason I learned to teach. The first university course I taught was Wildlife Management Techniques, a hands-on field course covering everything from species ID and radio telemetry to quantitative methods, and he walked me through all of it: how he thought about a class, why he made the choices he made, what the hard parts were. That’s the closest thing I’ve had to a teaching apprenticeship. Field courses like this are genuinely hard to teach well. You have to know where to find animals at different field sites, when to schedule labs around the weather, and how to make all of it actually teach something. A lot of that you only learn by watching someone else do it first. I think this kind of mentorship – senior faculty showing newer faculty how a complicated course actually works, is one of the most underrated forms of professional development a department can offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you hope students look back on in ten years and say about your class(es)?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funny you ask – I was just reflecting about what I remember from my own time as an undergrad in this department. It’s not really the content. What I remember is the field courses, being pushed to learn things I didn’t think I could do, the relationships with my professors and classmates, and the stories my professors told in lecture about their work and adventures, which made me realize this was a path I could take too. I didn’t realize until much later how much all of that shaped the way I lived my life and how I teach now. I do hope my students remember some content from my courses. But more than that, I hope they carry forward who they spent time with, what they came to believe was possible, and the confidence that they can actually do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is a time when an assignment\/activity did not go as planned, and how did you make it a teachable moment? What did you learn about yourself?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, I planned a 50-minute class around six shorebird management case studies, each with a mini-lecture, guided discussion questions, the works. We got through one. The first case took off in a way I hadn’t anticipated (students had a lot to say, including solutions I hadn’t thought of myself) and yet I kept watching the clock thinking we have to move on, we have to move on<\/em>. Eventually I just stopped fighting it and let the conversation finish. My students have gotten used to this. It’s probably the thing I struggle with most as a teacher: the discipline of cutting back content to leave room for students to actually engage with it. Both feel so valuable to me, and it’s hard not to get excited about new material and want to do the full show-and-tell. But what I keep relearning is that one case study students genuinely wrestled with is worth more than six I rushed them through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How have you seen teaching evolve over your career? And\/or where do you see teaching going?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more I teach, the braver I get about trying new things. But the bigger question on my mind right now is what universities are for<\/em> as AI changes what students need from us. AI is already automating a lot of the technical training that used to be the core of a degree. What AI can’t do is the human side of environmental science: negotiating with stakeholders who disagree with you, building coalitions, making decisions when nobody’s sure what the right answer is. Those things are learned by doing them, in community, with people you trust and people you don’t. I think the universities that figure out how to put that kind of learning at the center (actual fieldwork on real projects, sustained mentorship, real practice grappling with problems that don’t have clean answers) are going to be the ones that still feel necessary in twenty years. That’s the work I’m interested in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you relax after a long day of teaching?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Evening grocery shopping while listening to a podcast! It’s great because it’s something active to do while I’m still wired, and it helps me decompress and get out of my head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you like to do for fun?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Make music. I sang in choirs for years, paused everything during a really busy year, and now that the semester is over I’m dusting off my fiddle and learning to play upright bass.
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Would you like to nominate a faculty member to be included in an ATL Monthly Spotlight?<\/h1>\n\n

Submit this form<\/a> for consideration.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/section>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meet ATL’s Faculty Spotlight for May 2026, Martina M\u00fcller. A graduate of URI\u2019s wildlife and conservation biology program, Martina brings a global perspective shaped by more than a decade of field based research on seabirds in coastal ecosystems across five continents. Her diverse professional experiences in science, agriculture, advocacy, and local politics inform an interdisciplinary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5324,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[371],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24172,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24170\/revisions\/24172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/atl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}