Teaching & Mentorship

As a teacher and mentor, I believe it is my responsibility to build a structured learning environment that empowers students to creatively engage with science. We learn better when we interact with science, whether that be through experimentation, discussion, or generation of data, reports, and presentations. Engagement should be creative, meaning students are given te creative freedom to solve problems & excel in their studies with diverse perspectives and skillsets.

Teaching

I am equipped with more than six years of teaching experience. I have fulfilled teaching, teaching assistant, and course-developer roles for seven different courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. I have experience teaching a variety of topics including introductory geology, geomorphology, advanced field geology, remote sensing, computing, and morphodynamic modeling.

As a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara, I recently developed and taught a new graduate course titled GEOG288VG: Quantifying Global River Kinematics from Remote Sensing Observations. I designed this course to build student knowledge in fluvial processes and offer training in remote sensing skills, with an emphasis on creative engagement. Students were given the opportunity to choose five river systems on Earth, for which they generated their own new analyses of river mobility based on NASA satellite imagery. Some example presentations from this course can be found here.

Mentorship

I have over seven years of formal experience as a research mentor. I have mentored four undergraduate students at Caltech and the University of Minnesota in various research projects incorporating theoretical modeling, remote sensing, laboratory flume experiments, and field observations. Each mentee worked with me for at least two years, at which point they graduated college and pursued graduate education or a career in STEM. I maintain professional relationships with my former mentees and am proud to list their detailed contributions in my CV.