I believe that no one is a "natural teacher;" being an effective educator requires practice, observation, and ongoing critical self-reflection. As such, I've tried to take advantage of Columbia's pedagogical development resources to improve my teaching practice. For the past few years, I have participated in the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning's Teaching Development Program (CTL TDP), participating in workshops, learning communities, and other teaching exercises. I've also taken advantage of the resources offered by the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) to learn the best practices for STEM teaching. In Fall 2022, I completed the online CIRTL course "An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching," and in Spring 2023 I completed the course "Advancing Learning Through Evidence-Based STEM Teaching."
For the 2022-2023 academic year, I served as a Lead Teaching Fellow (LTF) for the CTL. In this role, I served as a liaison between the CTL and the Columbia astronomy department, organizing pedagogical development events in the department and advertising the CTL's teaching resources to the astronomy grad students. In October 2022, I held a workshop titled "Teaching Scientifically: Improving your teaching via the scientific method," in which I introduced the concept of "Teaching-as-Research" and led participants through the basic steps of planning a Teaching-as-Research project; in March 2023, I held a similar workshop titled "Inquiry-based learning: Teaching students to think like scientists", during which we discussed best practices for implementing inquiry-based learning in astronomy, with particular focus on inquiry-based labs. The following academic year (2023-2024), I served as a Senior Lead Teaching Fellow (SLTF), mentoring a cohort of LTFs and co-developing the workshop "Moving Forward Together: The Interdependence of Instructor and Student Motivation," which was run both in-person via the Columbia CTL and online via CIRTL.
In December 2022, I helped start a new teaching development initiative in the astronomy department called "Teaching Tea." The goal of Teaching Tea was to provide an open forum for teaching-related discussions in the department, bringing together astronomers at all career stages to share and reflect on their teaching experiences. In September 2023, we rebranded Teaching Tea to ``CommuniVerse,'' broadening the scope of our discussions to include science communication. Since then, CommuniVerse has been going strong with two meetings per month and regular attendance from grad students, postdocs, and faculty.
I was recently awarded the GSAS Teaching Scholars Fellowship, allowing me to teach a new class of my own construction during the Spring 2026 semester. You can find the syllabus for this new course -- titled "Our Magnetic Universe: An Introduction to Astrophysical Magnetism" -- here.