Teaching and Outreach

Teaching and Outreach

As a passionate educator, I have experience as both a teaching assistant and lead instructor at both the graduate and undergraduate level, as well as extensive K-12 outreach experience. Additionally, I have experience in program development and higher ed administration as an active member of the The University of Chicago human genetics DEI committee. My professional goal is to cultivate a future where all students have the opportunity to pursue a STEM education.

Teaching

Citizen Science Instructor at Bard College

In 2022 I participated in the Citizen Science Program at Bard College as a data science strand faculty member. For the duration of the intensive 2.5 week course I was the primary instructor for a class of 15 first year undergraduate students. The core curriculum focused on developing student’s scientific literacy, covering everything from the production of scientific knowledge to science policy, education, and communication, through the lens of water. Alongside the core curriculum, I also taught and helped develop data science labs. Throughout these labs I taught my students, most of whom who had never programmed before, basic analysis-focused R and GIS programming and supervised their independent research projects. Seeing my students go from having never coded before to developing and testing their own hypotheses in the span of less than three weeks was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

QBio: Quantitative Analysis Bootcamp

In 2021 and and 2022 I participated first as a Teaching Assistant, and then as an instructor in the week-long Quantitative Bootcamp for incoming PhD students in the Biological Sciences Division at The University of Chicago. The goal of QBio is to introduce computational concepts (programming in R, data visualization, statistics) to all incoming biology students, as well as demonstrate why computation is important in biology through applied workshops. As a teaching assistant I facilitated small group learning for basic and advanced R, as well as a population genetics workshop. As an instructor, I revised and taught multiple sessions of a population genetics workshop.

Teaching Assistant

  • Human Variation and Disease (2020 and 2022)
    • Graduate course for UChicago covering core concepts in sequencing, population genetics theory (coalescent, selection, neutral theory), quantitative genetics, and human evolutionary history
    • Responsible for designing/updating and leading four computational labs, as well as leading weekly discussion sections covering theory or discussing a scientific paper
  • Human Genetics 1 (2020)
    • Graduate course for UChicago covering concepts in human genetics, including medical, statistical, and epigenetics.
    • Responsible for leading two computational labs sessions and guiding 4 students through a mock grant writing process

Outreach

UC COMBO

I am a founding member of University of Chicago COMputational Biology Outreach (UC COMBO) and current director of outreach. UC COMBO aims to introduce computational biology to Chicago-area middle and high school through interactive python workshops. Our workshops focus of demonstrating the utility of coding for answering biological questions and I have personally co-taught workshops for over 5 years as well as helping to develop the curriculum. As biology and medicine shift to larger and larger datasets, computational skills will become increasingly important and I believe students will benefit from exposure to coding and computational careers at the K-12 level.

Genetics and Race Reading Group

In 2020 I participated in reading group on the History of Race and Genetics and developed the website to share our materials. The experience fundamentally changed how I view the relationship between science and society and strengthed my commitment to understand (and teach) how the history of human genetics has and continues to contribute to racism.

DEI Committee

Since 2023 I have been a member of the combined Human Genetics and Genetics, Genomics, and Systems Biology DEI committee. As part of my committee work, I co-planned a genetics DEI day where we hosted workshops on DEI topics (bias in admissions, how to be an ally, and bias breaks) run by a DEI professional. I strongly believe in the mission of the DEI committee and continue to work towards our goal of advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in the genetics community at The University of Chicago.