Teaching
I emphasize active learning and providing hands-on experience with real data and modern computational tools. I developed two courses (Astro 416 & Astro 528) courses that emphasize:
Fundamental concepts — lab tutorials start as low-code, emphasizing concepts over syntax. As students gain experience, they start modifying code, and eventually work up to writing performant code to support a project of their own design.
Modern software development practices — selected courses demonstrate how to uses Julia for high-level, performant, scientific computing, as well as such as version control, literate programming, and automated testing.
Real scientific data — students work with actual astronomical datasets.
Recent Penn State Courses
ASTRO 140: Life in the Universe
An introductory course exploring the scientific search for life beyond Earth, from the origins of life on our planet to the detection and characterization of exoplanets and the prospects for finding biosignatures.
ASTRO 416: Exoplanets & Data Science
An upper-level undergraduate course covering statistical methods, data analysis, and computational techniques for astronomical research, with an emphasis on exoplanet science.
ASTRO 528: High-Performance Scientific Computing for Astrophysics
A graduate course introducing modern techniques for computationally intensive astrophysical research, including parallel computing (shared memory, distributed, GPU), the Julia programming language, benchmarking and optimization, and reproducible scientific computing.
ASTRO 589: Seminar — Extremely Precise Radial Velocity Surveys
A graduate seminar covering the latest developments in EPRV science, instrumentation, and data analysis.
ABIOL 590: Astrobiology Seminar
A graduate seminar about recent advances in Astrobiology and emphasizing interdisciplinary communications skills.
Guest lectures
Astro 1: Astronomical Universe
Astro 542: Interstellar Medium & Star Formation
Geosc 474: Astrobiology
DS 200: Introduction to Data Sciences
DS 440: Data Sciences Capstone
Astrostatistics Summer Schools (lectures about Markov chain Monte Carlo in practice)
PhD Committees
As a member of the Penn State graduate faculty, I serve on many PhD committees. I serve as a faculty representative for the Graduate Computational Minor and the Astrobiology Dual-title Degree PhD program. I previously served on the Data Sciences Intercollege major management committee.
University of Florida (previous institution)
Ast 2037: Life in the Universe
Ast 4930: Planetary Astronomy
Ast 6612: Planetary Astrophysics
Ast 7939: Extrasolar Planets
Ast 6935: Frontiers of Astronomy