Teaching

My style of teaching is similar to building a structure out of LEGOs. I like to walk students through the importance of each brick, and I ask students to use their intuition about how the bricks should come together to form subunits of a lesson. Then together, we connect those subunits to complete the construction of the concept. I typically present material verbally and with drawn illustrations and well as virtual visual aids. One of my strongest talents in teaching is conveying statistical methods through drawings. I taught the lab section of the BioStats course at CSULB which is known as one of the tougher courses in the biology curriculum. Students regularly take the course multiple times to pass. I gained a reputation for helping students who had previously failed the course to pass and for having a high pass rate of first time students. I received some of the highest teaching review scores from students on record for that course. Now at UC Davis, I teach Introduction to Biological Sciences Lab and the cooresponding summer bootcamp for this course. Here I strive to be a flexible teacher and mentor and mold my teaching style to the needs of my students. See below for more information on the courses I have taught.

Courses Taught

Fall 2017

BIO 153: Introduction to Marine Biology

Teaching Assistant, Cal State Long Beach

Intro to Marine Bio is a course for lower-division students interested in marine science. The course is designed to describe how marine animals survive in aquatic conditions and the interactions among organisms within marine communities. The students are typically being introduced to science for the first time in their college career. The structure of my lectures was to teach about marine ecology and describe some of the questions scientists are interested in. Then the students are brought to the field and have the opportunity to collect data from commonly used methods in marine science such as sein netting, transect tape surveys, timed visual surveys, morphological measurements, and more. The students wrote lab reports and had the opportunity to analize and interpret data they collected.

Spring 2017 - Summer 2019

BIO 260: Biostatistics

Teaching Assistant, Cal State Long Beach

Biostatistics is an intensive upper-division course at Cal State Univ. Long Beach that teaches probability and introductory statistics to answer biological questions. During these lab sections, I lectured on the theory and basis of statistical analysis from descriptive stats through ANOVA and linear regression and correlation. As a class, we did an in-depth walkthrough of performing statistical analysis in the program R. Teaching for this course was much more independent than a typical TA position. I was responsible for designing my own lectures, exams, quizzes, homework assignments, and grading. Given such independence, I truly refined my teaching skills and ways of making an initially intimidating subject attainable and interesting to students. During my last semester teaching the lab for Biostats, the core instructor's child was born early, I was chosen to take over teaching the core lecture for the course. During this time, I taught in a lecture hall with 300 students present.

Fall 2020

BioSci 2B: Introduction to Biological Sciences: Principles of Ecology and Evolution

Teaching Assistant, UC Davis

As a teaching assistant for an introductory-level course in the biological sciences curriculum, I instructed and graded lab sections and proctored exams. Lab topics range from population and quantitative genetics with fruit flies to assessing diversity in different plant communities and predation experiments with Gambusia and mosquito larvae.

Summer 2021

Biology Bootcamp: Biology Undergraduate Scholars Program

Instructor, UC Davis

In this intensive, fast-paced, bootcamp style course, students are introduced to the most difficult topics coverd in BioSci 2B (see below). I had the freedom to design all of my own materials for this course, including: lectures, homework assignments, and exams. This course is designed to be be a resource for underserved students in biology that struggle with STEM courses. Each day included a lecture on BioSci 2B material, a meeting with guest scientists from diverse backgrounds, and a lesson on resources for managing psychosocial barriers to success in sciences. Here is a link to my lecture materials for this course.

Fall 2022 -
Winter 2023

EVE 101: Introduction to Ecology