Training, educating, and mentoring young scientists and the lay public are critical to our national success in an ever-expanding global science community. Through teaching and mentoring, scientist scholars must sustain a consistent base of highly trained, optimistic, logical, and creative new scientists, clinicians, and scientifically-aware citizens. It is important to have a diverse, educated population for the science-related public policy decisions that are so critical to provide funding, regulate science practice and quality, and also support the basic, translational, and applied science that develops technologies and treatments that applies to everyone. As a professor at a state institution, I participate in teaching/mentoring and educational community outreach efforts to contribute to these aims. My specific course-related teaching aims are: 1) to teach subject matter courses with interdisciplinary context in mind, 2) to incorporate problem-solving and research design into regular lecture and laboratory syllabi, 3) to train students to adeptly maneuver and critically review the scientific literature that supplements their regular textbooks, and 4) to foster independent and creative thinking through diverse teaching techniques in lecture and lab. I hope to achieve these aims through constant feedback and communication, fair and effective, but challenging evaluation tools, and incorporation of the best and newest teaching technologies available to educators today. I further aim, as a mentor, to provide mentees with proactive approaches to their future, encouraging independent and tenacious pursuit of their future careers through scholarships, fellowships, test preparation, interview and career seeking skills, and other similar practical educational devices. Two additional goals in my teaching role at the university are: (1) recruiting underrepresented STEM field minorities and (2) administering and participating in community science outreach. physiology, exercise physiology, sport performance, mechanisms of adaptation and response to exercise, stress physiology, comparative physiology, osmotic and kidney physiology/pathology, heat stress, heat shock proteins and chaperones, proteostasis, tRNAs, genomic medicine/personalized medicine, genetics, genomics, molecular biology, biochemistry, organic chemistry, physics, statistics, introductory bioinformatics, nutrition, hydration