Teaching
One of my primary roles is that of an educator. As such, I am continually working to improve my abilities as an instructor and a mentor. I teach courses through the Yale Department of Astronomy and have previously served as an instructor for the Yale Young Global Scholars program during summers 2021 and 2022.
I have developed and taught a wide range of pedagogical workshops at the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, both through the teaching center and the Yale Graduate Writing Lab. I also co-founded and co-led two student mentoring programs in astronomy, including the ongoing Yale Astro Sibs program.
ASTR 050
I designed a new Yale freshman seminar, ASTR 050: The Ethics of Space Exploration, which I taught for the first time during Spring 2024. The seminar covers topics including space law, the role of fundamental science in society, colonization, the commercial space age, interstellar space travel, sustainability, light pollution, satellite debris, and the global impacts of space exploration on Earth.
ASTR 255/PHYS 295
During Fall 2023, I taught ASTR 255/PHYS 295: Research Methods in Astrophysics. This course is required for Yale Astronomy and Astrophysics majors. It provides an introduction to astrophysics research methods, including an overview of instrumentation, spectroscopy, photometry, radio astronomy, and relevant tools in Python. I will be teaching this class a second time during Fall 2024.
The Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning
From 2018-2022, I served as a McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, where I developed and ran Fundamentals of Teaching workshop series and Advanced Teaching Workshops for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. In this role, I conducted classroom observations to provide support for Teaching Fellows at Yale, and I helped to organize and run Yale's Spring Teaching Forum and the biannual Teaching at Yale Day event for first-time graduate student instructors. Together with the community of Fellows, I regularly discussed pedagogy and related academic literature. The workshops that I have led include the following:
- Fundamentals of Teaching Science (4-part series)
- Fundamentals of Teaching Physics (4-part series)
- Fundamentals of Evidence-Based Teaching (4-part series)
- Contemporary Controversies (4-part series; webinar)
- Teaching Quantitative Reasoning (2-part series)
- Writing Across the Disciplines (2-part series)
- Mentoring in the Lab (2-part series; webinar)
- Difficult Conversations in the Classroom - Gender
- Teaching First-Generation and Non-Traditional Students
- Enriching the Classroom through Multimedia
- Assessing Participation Equitably
- Rubrics and Grading
- How We Learn (webinar)
- Mentoring Undergraduates (webinar)
- Preparing and Delivering Effective Lectures (webinar)
- Leading Effective Discussions (webinar)
- Classroom Observation (webinar)
- Universal Design for Learning (webinar)
- Religion in the Classroom (webinar)
- Trauma-Informed Teaching (webinar)
- Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in the Classroom (webinar)
The Yale Graduate Writing Lab
From January 2020 through May 2021, I was a McDougal/Poorvu Writing Fellow at Yale’s Graduate Writing Lab, which supports the writing and communication endeavors of Yale graduate and professional school students. In this position, I served as a writing consultant, working with individual students to build their communication skill sets across all forms of scientific writing, grant/fellowship proposals, and oral presentations. I also collaborated with the diverse community of Writing Fellows to organize and run multidisciplinary workshops, seminars, and panels related to academic writing. The programs that I led or co-led include the following:
- Presenting Engagingly in the Sciences (4-part series)
- From Paper to Publication in the Sciences (5-part series)
- Writing a Prospectus in the Sciences
- Scientific Research and Writing (6-part series)
- Compiling a Constructive Peer-Review in the Sciences
- NSF GRFP Peer-Review Groups (Summer 2020, Fall 2020)
Yale Young Global Scholars
I was an instructor for the YYGS Innovations in Science and Technology track during summers 2021 and 2022. Through this program, I worked with high school students from around the world and taught six custom-designed seminar courses about physics and astrophysics during each session. I returned to YYGS as a guest faculty lecturer in 2024.
Yale Astro Sibs
I co-founded the Yale Astro Sibs mentoring program in 2018, and I co-organized the program from 2018-2021. Prior to the development of Astro Sibs, I also co-developed and led an analogous astronomy mentoring program in the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department. Yale's Astro Sibs program builds community by connecting Yale Astronomy undergraduates with graduate students and postdocs in the program, as well as offering group events for all early-career department members. Astro Sibs continues to be led by graduate students in the department, and more information can be found at the link here.