Miranda Welsh

Miranda Welsh: Preventing Pandemics One Paper at a Time

K’Mari Greene, Trinity Communications

The First-Year Experience in Trinity College of Arts & Sciences seeks to build community as students explore important and timely questions from multiple perspectives through the longstanding FOCUS program and new Constellations cohorts.

There are 16 Constellations offered in the 2025-2026 academic year. Miranda Welsh, lecturing fellow in the Thompson Writing Program, is teaching WRITING120: Preventing Pandemics: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Preparedness, part of the How Do Humans Understand Life, Death, and the In-Between? Constellation. 

Welsh is participating in Constellations because she’s excited to help students draw connections between their classes, and this opportunity also allows her the chance to meet faculty across the university who are thinking about health issues from different perspectives. 

Welsh’s research focuses on disease ecology, a field that examines how environmental and evolutionary forces affect pathogen/host relationships. The students in her classes often haven’t had a lot of experience with academic science writing, but Welsh encourages them to explore connections between the sciences and the humanities.

“My class fits into the Constellation because we think about how culture and history shape exposure to pathogens in the form of epidemics,” she said, “but we also consider questions about how contemporary politics, economics and human-environment interactions also influence the emergence and spread of epidemics. We explore these questions through our reading and, of course, writing.”

We sat with Welsh to learn more about her approach to teaching. This interview has been lightly edited for length and content.

"No single discipline has all the answers to our biggest questions, and we develop a fuller understanding of those questions and diverse methods to investigate them by working together across disciplines — that’s the humility."

Why did you decide to teach this class as part of a Constellation? 

One of the things I’ve always liked about my class is that it’s a small seminar, so it can be a really good source of community for students in their first year at Duke. The transition to college isn’t easy, and I hope students will keep the community they experience in their Constellation throughout their time here and beyond. 

What are some goals you have for students as they navigate your class and Constellations?

I was inspired to get involved with Constellations because the First-Year Experience is designed to develop humility and breadth of knowledge.

No single discipline has all the answers to our biggest questions, and we develop a fuller understanding of those questions and diverse methods to investigate them by working together across disciplines — that’s the humility. 

For breadth of knowledge, I think it’s just realizing the huge diversity of thinking that’s out there to explore. 

Can you talk about some lessons you’ve learned, and how you use them in your teaching? 

What really helped me develop a sense of communicating and writing successfully in the sciences was doing outreach and teaching as a teaching assistant in graduate school.

I’ve had so many good teachers and I try to emulate the things they did that worked for me. I get a lot out of not just reflecting on educational experiences, but also visiting others’ classes and seeing how they teach. First-year students are a particular audience and that’s something you have to know — how to communicate with different audiences. 

Patience is also an important skill. I’ve been lucky to have had teachers who had a lot of patience with me while I was learning, and I try to do the same with my students.