I have accumulated a large range of teaching and mentoring experiences as a graduate student and postdoc. I created and taught a new writing class in the Cornell Astronomy Department for first year undergraduates called Astronomy 109: The Birth of the Universe. The Cornell Knight Institute awarded me a year-long fellowship for my original curriculum design. 250 students signed up for only 17 slots (!) and Astro 109 was the most requested course in its semester. Outside of the university, I developed a series of astronomy activities for visits I made to first, second, & third grade classrooms at Fall Creek Elementary. Many of the lesson plans (and required materials) are now available to educators in the Ithaca area via Main Street Science.

More information for these 2 classes is below.

All first year undergraduates at Cornell are required to take 2 writing seminars to prepare them for the rest of their college careers. The Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines coordinates over 100 of these seminars of which roughly 2/3 are taught by graduate students. Although these courses are offered on a wide range of subjects, very few are taught on scientific topics and none exist in the physical sciences.

In my still very young career as a scientist, I have already spent many evenings attempting to fend off the powers of sleep as I struggle through a scattered and confusing scientific paper. Writing skills are seldom a significant part of a scientific education, and poorly written papers are not only inconvenient for students like myself but also harmful to the progress of science. No matter how high the quality of an individual's research, if that person cannot communicate her or his ideas to others, the contribution will be lost. So out of a desire for clearer, more interesting papers to read and a concern for the vulnerable art of science writing, I decided to teach a writing seminar on the topic of cosmology out of Cornell's Astronomy department. I chose the texts, designed the curriculum, and formulated the essay assignments. Based on my course design, I was awarded the Buttrick-Crippen Fellowship to teach the seminar.

The texts used were Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, Michael Rowan-Robinson's Nine Numbers of the Cosmos, and Carl Sagan's Billions & Billions. The description I wrote for the university's course catalog is below. For more information, lectures, or assignments, please contact me.

Course Description: Our knowledge of the universe has been revolutionized by discoveries in the past century and is very much a work in progress. The history of the origin, evolution, and ultimate fate of the entire universe (collectively known as cosmology) is full of instances where a widely accepted belief was shown to be most likely false. Our current cosmological theories are also riddled with many issues that are not yet fully understood. We will read popular texts by such authors as Carl Sagan and Alan Lightman to learn what we know about some recent burning cosmological questions: What happened after the Big Bang? What exactly are dark matter and dark energy?  How do we know that the universe is expanding? What does the future hold for our universe? Students will have an opportunity to participate in some of the many currently heated debates in cosmology through writing and in-class discussions.

Through a program called GRASSHOPR, the Cornell Public Service Center links interested graduate students who want to develop lesson plans with teachers in local classrooms. I visited first, second, and third grade classrooms at Fall Creek Elementary once a week with activities on topics like the solar system, the phases of the Moon, the reasons for the seasons, the Mars rovers, and stellar evolution. We also took annual trips to the Fuertes Observatory to look at sunspots and solar flares.

The lesson plans I used can be found on the GRASSHOPR website (complete with my notes on what worked and what didn't). They are easily adaptable to any elementary school age group. If you are interested in obtaining the materials needed for the activites, teachers in the Ithaca area can do so at no cost through a program run by the Nanobiotechnology Center at Cornell called Main Street Science. For more information, see their webpage.