Teaching & Outreach

Teaching Experience

I am passionate about teaching, and have taught students ranging in age from 4th grade to graduate students. I earned a CTSI certification for STEM teaching in 2020, and I regularly guest lecture on neural engineering topics such as the Cable Equation. At the University of Pittsburgh, I was a TA for graduate Neural Engineering as well as undergraduate Digital Signal Processing. I now co-facilitate the BIOENG 2900 Fellowship Writing class, for which I helped redesign the syllabus to focus on effective scientific communication.

In addition to graduate-level teaching, I have authored curricula to teach programming concepts to students at the K-12 level. The first of these is a workshop found here on the basics of Python programming through game design. I have used this curriculum to teach a clinic for middle school girls, and another clinic for underrepresented minority students who had aged out of the foster care system. I have also adapted Georgia Tech's brilliant EarSketch curriculum as a course for either 4th graders or 9th-12th graders to learn Python through music. I taught this curriculum at Pittsburgh's Miller African-Centered Academy. For all of the materials from that course, you are welcome to contact me.

My teaching philosophy statement can be viewed here.

Many of my teaching resources can be found here.

Outreach

As described above, I have written curricula for several programming clinics aiming to provide educational opportunities at the K-12 level focused on women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. In partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Community Engagement Center and the local BMES chapter, I submitted on the outcomes of music programming courses to the Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computer Diversity (CoNECD) 2022 Conference. In addition to these efforts, I taught an 8 week seminar course for 9th graders on STEM careers and engineering design, covering topics ranging from robotics to large-scale scientific efforts such as pandemic response.

In addition to teaching clinics and class units, I aim to improve access to STEM through diversity training and discussions, undergraduate recruitment, and policy changes at the lab and department level. I regularly judge competitions such as Science Olympiad and the Pittsburgh Regional Science and Engineering Fair that give K-12 students a chance to demonstrate hands-on science projects. Outside of the lab, I also work on efforts to improve voting access and participate in the Empty Bowls Project, a fundraising effort by ceramicists supporting local food banks.

As part of my efforts for inclusion and diversity in lab, I help run a seminar and discussion series covering race, gender and sexuality in STEM, disability, and other neuroethics topics.