Teaching

I have experience teaching undergraduates at UCLA in both the Department of Sociology (Introductory Sociology and Sociology of Education) and the Institute for Society and Genetics, where for the past several years I have been the primary summer instructor for the introductory course to UCLA's innovative Human Biology and Society (HBS) degree program. The HBS program teaches students to think about problems situated at the intersection of biology and society by drawing on ideas from a variety of disciplines including sociology, biology, anthropology, economics, history, and environmental science. I enjoy the challenge of encouraging students whose background is primarily in the natural sciences to think about the social implications of biological developments and vice versa. Many of the issues my students critically engage in the HBS program—antibiotic resistance, conservation of nature, epigenetic inheritance, climate change—are of contemporary importance and require creative thinking from multiple perspectives. I have also mentored students in groups and as individuals working on in-depth research projects, with topics as varied as the resurgence of single-sex education in public schools, social conceptions of lab-grown meat, the Zika crisis, "Right to Try" laws for pharmaceuticals, and the consequences of CRISPR gene editing for disability rights. In my teaching, I aim to both foster the critical thinking skills necessary to make sense of these challenges, as well as to help students figure out which issues are of particular interest to them and may serve as entry points into future career paths.

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For more information about my teaching philosophy, course evaluations, and sample syllabi, please contact me.