teaching

Teaching

Teaching has played an integral role in my development as a scientist. I am interested in teaching interdisciplinary methods to approach biological questions across all scales drawing heavily from physics and mathematics as well as from the computational sciences.

Example Computational tutorials

Euler-Forward Integration
Tutorial Notebook
This tutorial was used to teach undergraduates how to integrate ordinary differential equations using the Forward-Euler method.

A Chemical Master Equation for Constitutive Gene Expression
Tutorial Notebook
Chemical master equations are incredibly useful in understanding the “rates and weights” of biological processes. This tutorial teaches the student how to write them and explore their behavior computationally, focusing on the Poisson statistics of the constitutive promoter.

Bifurcation Analysis of an Autoactivation Circuit
Tutorial Notebook
This tutorial explores the dynamics of an autoactivation genetic circuit and explains the origin of bifurcations.

A Stochastic Simulation of Constitutive Gene Expression
Tutorial Notebook
A primer on using the Gillespie algorithm to understand the dynamics of constitutive expression.

The Random Walk
Tutorial Notebook
A primer on the 1D random walk and how to simulate them using Python.

Quantitative Image Processing
Tutorial Notebook Data Set
This tutorial covered the basics of quantitative image processing and led students through segmentation of single-celled bacteria to compute the intensity distribution of a YFP reporter gene.

Basic DNA Sequence Analysis
Tutorial Notebook Data Set
A tutorial on using DNA sequence to understand the biogeography of Skinks on Fernando de Naronha. This tutorial is written to given an introduction to basic programming skills with Python and provides introductory intuition on how DNA sequence can be used to identify relationships between species.

Other Classes At Caltech & Beyond

Below are links to the various courses I have had the privilege to TA.

Human Impacts by the Numbers
2020
A zoom-based course open to the public which gave a wide view of all the ways in which human action changes the face of the planet.

Evolution
2020
A course for upper-level Caltech undergraduates which provides a quantitative and qualitative summary of biology’s greatest idea — evolution.

Physical Biology Bootcamp
2019 2018 2017
An intensive week-long graduate course which teaches the utility of biological numeracy and its application from theory to experiment.

Bi1 - The Great Ideas of Biology
2017
A freshman biology course for non-biology majors which teaches the fundamental principles of modern biology with an emphasis on calculation and quantitative thinking.

Physical Biology of the Cell
2018 2017 2016 2015
This courses takes a in-depth view at the investigation of biological phenomena using principles from physics. Typical topics of inquiry are dynamics of the cytoskeleton, back-of-the-envelope estimation, genetic regulation, cellular signaling, and evolution. This course is taught all over the world at universities such as Caltech, GIST, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Intro. to Programming in the Biological Sciences
2016
A week long course attended by undergraduates, graduate students, and post-docs which teaches the principles of programming and its application to real-life biological problems.

Data Analysis in the Biological Sciences
2016 2015
This course exposes undergraduates, grad students, and post-docs to practical data analysis using Bayesian inferential methods such as parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, and regression. The homework assignments are almost completely open ended and often involve cutting-edge data from Caltech and beyond.

Bi1x - Exploration through Experimentation
2015 2014
A course aimed at freshmen undergraduates which teaches the “great ideas of biology” through experimentation. Students perform a variety of experiments including single-cell microscopy, optogenetics, and DNA sequencing.