But teaching is no longer a laughing matter for Paulsen. It's a passion.

As the spring quarter winds down, she is finishing up teaching a course on cognitive psychology. The cognitive psychology course is the ninth different class that she has either taught or been a teaching assistant for, an extraordinary number of classes for a graduate student to teach.

This kind of versatility in the classroom is one of the reasons why Paulsen has been named one of the winners of the Excellence in Teaching awards.

Her teaching skills have drawn high praise from faculty and students alike.

"What I have especially come to appreciate about Debbie is the ease with which she can shift between working with highly motivated and mathematically well-prepared students to working with students who must start at a much lower level of quantitative complexity," said Laura Little, a 2005 Distinguished Teaching Award winner.

" I can think of no other graduate student in our department who has shown as much promise as a researcher and a teacher."

"Paulsen's dedication to her students and the learning process turned what I anticipated being the worst academic experience of my career into one of the most worthwhile experiences I had as an undergraduate," adds one of her students, who also credits her with being the inspiration for applying and being accepted to graduate school.

Paulsen's teaching also stretches halfway around the world to the Tangkoko Nature Preserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where she has done field research for her doctoral dissertation.

She is studying the psychological and physiological effects of tourism on bands of the black macaque, an endangered primate species. That research involves examining how humans are affecting behavior that leads to aggression. While working in the nature preserve, she was approached by one ranger to teach English to his colleagues.

"But I also found that they were starved for conservation and behavioral information on which to make management decisions," she said. "What sparked me was hearing a ranger saying things like, ‘See that lone monkey. He's lost and he won't survive alone.' That's just not the case. Young male black macaques leave their native group and join another troop. It is a natural part of their lives. The rangers had a background in forestry, but lacked a general of knowledge about the behavioral patterns of the animals they were managing.

So in 2004 and 2005, Paulsen taught them English, animal behavior and conservation to help them be more effective.

And teaching certainly figures in Paulsen's future when she's finished work on her doctorate in about two years.

"I would be happy to continue working in conservation biology, but teaching is what I want to put my focus on. I would never have predicted that, but I can't picture any other decision at this point in my life. There is a lot of satisfaction in showing students they can do something and that they can succeed beyond their expectations," she said.