I am passionate about education and improving STEM education in particular. I taught as the instructor of record for a summer session of Math 101 - Calculus II for engineers at the University of Alberta in 2022. This was a class of around 90 students with 70 minute lectures every day. I taught the course as a flipped class with pre-lecture videos so that in class time could be focussed on practice solving problems. I managed 5 Teaching Assistants with several labs per week. I also served as a grader and guest lecturer for Math 475/575 - Elements of Mathematical Ecology in Fall 2022 at the University of Victoria.
I served as a Graduate Student Instructor four times during my PhD. I had the opportunity to design curriculum and co-lead the development and implementation of tutorial sections for the interdisciplinary problem-solving course “Sense and Sensibility and Science”, and I was also a GSI for “Origins: From the Big Bang to the Emergence of Humans”, and “Introduction to Mathematical Physics”. I was also a teaching assistant for 3 different physics courses as an undergraduate student.
Outside of the classroom, I co-wrote a commentary for Physics Today about improving graduate education in biophysics. I also served as the sole graduate student representative for three years on the Campus Committee on Teaching, which informs campus teaching policy and evaluates candidates for Distinguished Teaching Awards.
I believe that effective mentorship is also a crucial but underappreciated aspect of higher education. In 2017-2018, I served as a mentor for about 40 undergraduates a semester as a Berkeley Connect Fellow. This program connects undergraduates with a PhD student in their field of interest and involves one on one meetings, small group discussions, and field trips. I also directly mentored undergraduate students in my research group during my PhD, including a project where the student published a first-author paper, and another as an applied component of a mentoring course.