Teaching and Mentoring Experience Teaching has been a fundamental component of my academic training. I have been actively involved in teaching, tutoring, and mentoring high school and undergraduate research students throughout my doctoral and postdoctoral work at the City University of New York (CUNY). I taught General Chemistry (I & II) laboratory courses and recitation sections at CUNY for four years. I volunteered as a physical chemistry tutor for undergraduate students from CUNY.
At St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, my teaching assignment included a General Chemistry Laboratory course that also involved a ynergistic approach to conducting several laboratory sessions guided simultaneously by two instructors. Along with Dr. Ruth Stark and her graduate students at City College, I designed a curriculum for a biophysics foundation course (“Touring the tomato: A suite of chemistry laboratory experiments”) geared for undergraduate and high school students seeking research experience through CUNY’s College Now program.
The eight- module course introduces a panel of analytical techniques for studying the structural properties of biopolymers obtained from an inexpensive source such as the tomato fruit at increasingly etailed molecular levels. In its final phase, students design independent research projects related to structural investigations of various biomaterials obtained from fruits and vegetables. We tested our new curriculum by giving a summer course at City College and disseminated our ideas by publishing an article in the Journal of Chemical Education in 2012.
Thave recently designed a foundation course on computer simulations for undergraduate students. The goal of this course (“In silico Experimentation across Green Chemistry”) is to teach fundamental computer simulation techniques such as Monte Carlo, Brownian dynamics, and Molecular dynamics for the investigation of structural and dynamical properties of environmentally important organic materials. This work was accepted for an oral presentation at the 252nd ACS National Meeting in Philadelphia, PA (Green Chemistry Education: By the People and for the People, 2016).
At City College, my current teaching assignment focuses on the Macaulay Honors College Science Seminar 3; I am also designing and developing the course content, targeting at an interdisciplinary theme of biophysics and nanoscience. This skills-based course focuses on cientific thinking in the context of interdisciplinary topics and contemporary research areas, includes semester research projects, news essays, and video projects, and fosters collaborative assignments as well as individual contributions in order to establish a coherent curriculum and a flexible learning environment.
My mentoring career began at an early stage of my doctoral studies. I directly supervised high school and undergraduate research students in the Queens College materials science laboratory where I started my dissertation research. In 2006-2007, I maintained the materials science aboratory and supervised high school and undergraduate students’ projects. My students and I presented our results at the American Chemical Society National Meeting in 2007 and at the Materials Research Society Fall Meetings in 2006 and 2007, and published four articles in peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
The student from Townsend Harris High School won top awards based on our research outcomes at the New York City Science and Engineering Fair (NYCSEF) and the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in 2007. At City College, I advised a Hunter College High School student in a iophysical research project using NMR spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy to investigate the structural properties of plant cuticular biopolymers. Our work was accepted for presentations at the Eastern Analytical Symposium in 2010 and at the 52nd Experimental NMR Conference in 2011.
An article describing our research method was published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments in 2012. I advised another Hunter College High School student in a structural chemistry research project on synthetic melanin pigments; we presented our work at various national and international conferences in 2012 and 013 and published our results in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry in 2014. Finally, I helped several graduate students to start and develop their research projects at both Queens College and City College.
I supervised an undergraduate student from the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY for a bionanotechnology project pertaining to the use of diamond nanoparticles in cellular imaging and biosensing. This work was accepted for presentation at the 2014 Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS). Teaching Philosophy My experience as a graduate teaching assistant and adjunct ssistant professor, and as a mentor of high school and undergraduate students over ten years has helped me understand the significance of efficient teaching strategies in a range of academic settings.
Early on, I realized the need for multifaceted teaching approaches in order to make productive connections with diverse groups of students. My involvement in curriculum development gave me valuable insights and experience in laying out a course structure systematically. The one-to-one tutoring experience helped me consider how incorporating and adapting a talk-and-tweak approach could mprove a teaching method. I organized group activities among students to build a natural setting for collaborative learning and reciprocal teaching.
Mentoring high school and undergraduate students for interdisciplinary research projects ranging from bionanotechnology to applications of NMR in biophysics impressed upon me the value of cultivating independent thinking and the significance of designing a focused route to apply students’ skills and expand their knowledge. Most of my students, whom I mentored, are women and/or members of the groups traditionally underrepresented in physical sciences, as ell as first-generation college students.
As a leading public and urban university, CUNY has offered me a unique avenue to comprehend how I can contribute to diversity through research, teaching, and mentoring, by realizing students’ socioeconomic challenges in pursuing a science education at various stages. In some ways, I view teaching as a creative art that relies on establishing effective communication between teachers and students to facilitate knowledge transfer through reciprocal interactions.
Often student-oriented teaching provides a relatively convenient platform for active learning, and I count pon feedback from students to restructure my teaching methods. I appreciate that the use of technology can breathe new life into the traditional way of teaching a subject. Based on interdisciplinary academic training, I have taught students to apply knowledge and skills, gained from studying a specific subject, to a variety of areas.
I use an interactive means in classroom teaching to motivate undergraduate students towards a self-teaching process. I focus on engaging students in active learning by connecting their ideas and organizing their thoughts on a topic. I use my research experience to encourage tudents towards developing an independent thinking process. I apply an iterative process of adjustment and revision, as I have recognized that there is no ready-made recipe or single-faceted approach to devise an effective and rewarding teaching strategy.
Teaching Interests: Pathways for evolving teaching approaches I intend to focus on basic and specialized chemical and physical science courses as well as I am eager to teach and develop courses that aim to blend various topics of the natural and applied sciences such as biophysics, materials science, bionanotechnology, and environmental sciences. Depending on vailable infrastructure I will impart a flavor of contemporary experimental techniques along with a conceivable connection to computational studies and encourage student creativity by undertaking original research teamwork-based projects.
I will boost the level of interactive discussion on course topics via online forums and web-based programs such as Blackboard and e-portfolio, thus helping students to grasp extracurricular and challenging topics. Using hybrid teaching strategies, I will engage students in learning and help them digest complicated concepts. Effective classroom teaching counts on setting pecific learning goals, designing systematic lectures, responding to students’ questions with proper attention and respect, and framing reasonable questions to examine the students’ understanding of a topic.
Accordingly, I will make sure that the evaluation of students’ performance is fair and consistent. My personal experience as an international student and researcher in a foreign country underscores that sincere faculty-student interaction assists in developing a cordial and supportive social structure that encourages students toward learning and promotes the growth of a diverse scientific community.
