Throughout my physics career, I have made it a priority to get involved with teaching at the undergraduate-, graduate-, and general public levels.
Teaching is an important part of the career I want to have that includes research, classroom instruction and mentorship in the laboratory.
I believe that in order to be an effective instructor it is important that I give students a class that contains four basic attributes which, when taken in toto, bolster each other.
I am lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University teaching introductory calculus-based physics. I have previously taught non-calculus-based introductory physics at Elmhurst College and Loyola University Chicago.
My lectures are characterized by a combination of short instruction broken up by multiple-choice, anonymized, fast-evaluation questions before braking up the class into group work. Group work is to be encouraged at every turn outside of exams because science is, at its core, a collaborative enterprise. This practice has served me well while teaching remotely during the COVID-19 outbreak.
The syllabus for my current class can be found here.
My course on detector physics is part of the Postdoc Lecture Series at TRIUMF organized by TRIUMF's Graduate Student and Postdoc Society (GAPS). The course ran from October 19 to November 23, 2015.
In addition to the teaching assistant positions I filled throughout my time in graduate school, I also gave several lectures for undergraduates during my time at Argonne National Laboratory.
Later, as a postdoctoral fellow, I took the opportunity to be a guest lecturer for several nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry courses at both The University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University.
This is a lecture I recently gave at American University in Washington, DC.
As important as it is to help grow the next generation of physicists, improving the public's understanding of science through community outreach is equally important as it helps ensure a degree of scientific literacy in the country.
One of the most enjoyable public lectures I ever presented was a joint lecture I gave on the physics of baseball for the University of Chicago Alumni Association's annual excursion to a Chicago White Sox game in 2012. Along with my friend and University of Chicago physics alumnus, Benjamin Recchie, I gave a lecture on the physics of pitching while Ben gave the lecture on the physics of hitting.