Teaching and Service

Teaching

I have formal teaching experience at various capacities across my time at Northwestern and MIT, through which I learned how to distill complex knowledge into simple learnable concepts, and to clearly communicate these concepts to students.

At Northwestern, I served as an assistant for the graduate mechanical engineering course MechE 418: Multi-scale Modeling and Simulation in Fluid Mechanics, where I designed one of three main homework assignments for the course. The purpose of this assignment was to guide the students through the procedure for coarse-graining the dynamical properties of polymers. As part of the assignment, I introduced students to molecular simulation apparatus such as LAMMPS and VMD, and guided them through the quantitative analysis of the statistical mechanics of polymers. You can find the problem set here. You can also find the corresponding simulation files here, in case you would like to try out the problem set yourself.

At MIT, I served as a full-time teaching assistant for the undergraduate materials science and engineering course 3.034: Organic and Biomaterials Chemistry. This course was essentially a condensed undergraduate version of the core curriculum of my graduate polymers program, PPSM, and included short segments on polymer synthesis, polymer physics, and biological materials. I led recitations, office hours, and exam reviews for the students, and overall, I received high student evaluation scores on areas such as stimulating interest (6.5/7.0), knowledge of subject material (6.7/7.0), and supporting student learning (6.6/7.0).

At MIT, I also served as a guest lecturer for the graduate bioengineering & materials science and engineering course 20.463: Biomaterials Science and Engineering, in which I designed and taught a lecture titled “Measuring the Dynamics of Gels”. In this lecture, I taught a primarily bioengineering audience on the importance of the dynamical properties of gels in biological processes such as bacterial transport, cell-matrix interactions, and drug delivery, the basic physics that underlie the dynamics and viscoelastic properties of gels, and common macroscopic and microscopic techniques for measuring viscoelastic properties of biologically-relevant gels. You can find the lecture slides here.

Service

I am passionate about providing research experiences in STEM to younger students. I strongly benefited from research opportunities during my undergraduate years, and have sought to repay this favor forwards through intentional mentorship. I have so far served as a research mentor to 15 students across my time at Northwestern, MIT, and Stanford. As a mentor, I designed a wide range of independent research projects that challenged students to take ownership of their projects and develop a creative problem-solving mindset. Many of my students have since moved onto successful positions as PhD students at top institutions across the country, and as scientists at major engineering companies.