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(photo credit: Emma Ancel 📸)

I absolutely love teaching and I am excited by the opportunity to help students succeed—academically, professionally, and personally. I also enjoy learning about research in STEM education, with a focus on curriculum design, informatics/AI education, and universal design for learning. 🧠

Contents

  1. In the classroom
  2. Projects
  3. Other

In the classroom 👨🏼‍🏫

For all my classes, I like to use a somewhat comprehensive syllabus, such as this example. In the past, I have taught (terms link to Canvas for enrolled students):

Helpful software

Here are some great apps that were recently introduced to me:

Teaching assistants

If you’re interested in TA-ing for one of my courses, you’re welcome to reach out, but for the most part my TAs are pre-assigned in advance (and not by me 😔). Exceptions can be made for particularly strong fits, of course, and it is true that at Stanford (and most places) instructors get to pre-select their TAs. I always like to share some guidelines with my TAs so that we’re on the same page and so I can best support them!

Projects 📖

Although I am not a principal investigator (PI, aka Faculty), it doesn’t mean we can’t build things together. Here are some longer-term projects that I am thinking about, in no particular order of priority. These involve more extended conversations, 1+ quarters of weekly effort, and depending on the project and timing, we may be able to arrange some compensation for your efforts. If one of them sounds interesting to you, we can discuss it and see if it’s something we can pursue together. If you have your own ideas, I am very interested in knowing how I can support you.

Active interests

More pedagogy-focused:

  • Peer instruction (i.e., formative assessment check-in questions) for MATSCI 142: Quantum Mechanics (content development).
  • Mastery learning for Intro to MSE using the PrairieLearn platform (Python scripting, content development).
  • Front-end development of a MSE degree planning tool (JavaScript + frameworks).

More science-focused:

  • Extending grain boundary simulation capabilities through the GRIP tool (Python, shell).
  • Creating a database of grain boundary structures and phases.
  • Identifying structural descriptors for grain boundary atoms and phase classification (Python, shell).

Other examples

  • Course development. This can take a variety of forms, such as:
    • Developing an entirely new course. This not only requires the most effort, but also some convincing to the department that it is necessary. As we already have a lot of technical MSE courses, one course topic that particularly excites me is data visualization and communication.
    • Redesign an existing course. This may still require significant effort, but it’s an important consideration to continually update our courses to match societal developments. These courses may not have been offered for quite some time, such as MATSCI 156 (energy materials) or MATSCI 166 (materials informatics).
    • Creating learning modules. Ever taken a course and wished one of the topics could be explained better? Maybe you encountered it again later in your career and heard a better explanation. Here’s an opportunity to create some targeted materials that can enhance student learning, with the scope being up to you.
  • Curriculum support. I envision this to be slightly different from the previous section because some enhancements aren’t course-specific, but rather the MSE program as a whole. These could include:
    • Additional support (workshops, resources, etc.) for a particular aspect of the MSE program, such as undergraduate Honors or Research.
    • Additional workshops and guides for a particular milestone, such as fellowship applications, the PhD qualifying exam, or primers/prerequisites for unfamiliar students.
    • Program restructuring (e.g., course requirements and sequencing) to better align with present/future trends in the field. This will involve data collection and analysis (e.g., perhaps from alumni) and I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this topic.
  • Recruitment and Community. These two things go hand in hand. You can’t just invite someone to the dance—you gotta dance with them too.
    • How can we, in the wake of the SFFA court rulings, continue to attract diverse individuals to MSE and broaden participation in STEM?
    • Why does a Stanford student choose the MSE Major? Or perhaps even more illuminating: Why does a Stanford student not choose the MSE Major? Gathering this data will greatly inform where to prioritize our efforts.
    • How can we foster collaborations and communications among students in the MSE community? What does it take for techniques that are successful in the classroom to have a lasting impact in the general setting?

I want to conclude this section by saying that you can make an impact at any level, whether you’re a first-year undergraduate or fifth-year PhD student. I have personally worked on projects throughout my time at Stanford and Berkeley. Moreover, there are many other members of the Stanford MSE community, past and present, who have contributed to the success of the department. We look to you for the future. 🫵🏼

Other

This is more relevant for job applications than teaching, but you can see some of my philosophy in my teaching statement that I submitted to Stanford. My corresponding teaching demo is representative of how I’d teach a lesson.