Teaching and Mentoring
Teaching Strategies
I am really excited about using research as a tool for teaching biology and chemistry courses at the undergraduate level. Based on techniques I’ve learned through pedagogy courses at Harvard Medical School and the Bok Center at Harvard University, I have been able to incorporate “real” research into my teaching at several junctures:
1) While teaching general organic chemistry courses, I have been able to implement literature-based problem solving techniques to teach mechanisms of organic reactivity within the cell. Students are really excited to see that the mechanisms that they are solving have often only recently been worked out and published!
2) I have experience teaching CURE-based laboratory courses, enabling students to answer outstanding biological questions within a teaching laboratory setting.
3) At ETH Zürich, I am involved in teaching block courses, which give a small group of undergraduates the opportunity to answer an offshoot of one of my research questions within our lab in a three week intensive course.
Courses
Head Teaching Fellow for The Organic Chemistry of Life, Harvard University
During my PhD, I was the head teaching fellow for one of the large pre-med requirement organic chemistry courses, CHEM27, which focuses on understanding organic reactivity through the lens of biological processes. In this role, I was responsible for course content creation, exam and problem set writing, and lecturing in close collaboration with the main course instructor. I was able to interact closely with students and understand why organic chemistry courses trigger anxieties and how implementing problem solving-based evaluation approaches can ameliorate these issues for students.
Classroom Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) Instructor, Emmanuel College
As an adjunct biology instructor at Wellesley College, I taught a CURE-based laboratory course to early undergraduate students in the Biology Department. The focus of this course was to identify phage genes that block the proliferation of Mycobacterium smegmatis, a close relative of the pathogen that causes tuberculosis.
Co-director for the Biochemistry Winter Research Program, Wellesley College
In close collaboration with another instructor, I co-directed the Winter Session Biochemistry “bootcamp” at Wellesley College. This course gives first-year bachelor students from underserved high schools access to the laboratory-based science experiences that their peers from more affluent backgrounds may have had earlier in their educations. This course focuses on how to ask and answer scientific questions, how to design appropriate controls, how to present scientific data, and how to identify limitations/drawbacks of experimental results.
Mentoring
I have been lucky enough to mentor several excellent bachelors, masters, and PhD students in the lab. All of my mentees have been given independent projects that are offshoots of my work and were tasked with designing and executing experiments, analyzing the resulting data, and communicating their results. I believe that bachelors and masters students should be treated as “full” members of the lab, and I work to make sure they are given the same responsibilities (e.g., lab chores) and opportunities (e.g., presenting at group meeting) as PhD students and postdocs.
Of my mentees, many went on to continue their scientific careers (either through MD or PhD programs) after leaving the lab. I have also been able to include one of my masters students on a recent publication. I am extremely proud of their hard work and am so excited to see the new developments that their careers will bring.