Teaching & Mentorship

The TIMESTEP Research Apprenticeship pairs second-year astronomy/physics undergraduates with faculty research advisors for a paid academic-year research experience. The program provides mentorship and technical/professional development workshops to lower barriers to entry into research.

As graduate mentor, I lead weekly hands-on workshops, provide one-on-one mentorship, and develop curriculum in collaboration with the faculty advisory team which includes Prof. Gurtina Besla, Prof. Ed Prather, and Rebecca Lipson. To date I have mentored 38 undergraduate students, many of whom have gone on to first-author publications, prestigious REU programs, and national labs including JPL and FermiLab.

Materials I developed for the program:

1. Introduction to Git and Github — fundamentals of version control. Co-developed with Eden McEwen.
2. Introduction to Bash — work-along worksheet on bash commands and scripting for students with little prior programming experience.
3. Python basics and Numpy and Matplotlib — interactive Colab notebooks on Python fundamentals, arrays, and data visualization.

I received the Graduate Student Award in Teaching from the Department of Astronomy in 2025 for this work.

A week-long bootcamp for incoming Arizona Science students covering the programming and computational skills needed for research and coursework. I developed and led the Python and data visualization curriculum — interactive Jupyter notebooks on Python basics and Numpy and Matplotlib.

Held office hours, updated and graded all homeworks for 25+ students. I also designed and delivered two guest lectures connecting course material to my research on supermassive binary black holes — one on dynamical friction and gravitational-wave inspiral timescales (lecture 1), one on the numerical methods used at the research frontier (lecture 2, with in-class activity).

Held weekly office hours and wrote and graded five in-class quizzes.