Courses Taught

I teach a variety of courses at San José State University, including: Chem-101 (Chemistry and the Computer), Chem-100W (a technical communication course for chemists), Chem-160 (Physical Chemistry), and a graduate level Introduction to Computational Chemistry course (Chem-270). Below is a video where I give an overview of Chem-101 Chemistry and the computer, but introduction videos for all three of these courses can be found on my personal YouTube channel.

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy has been influenced by a wide variety of diverse teaching experiences at multiple institutions, including but not limited to: Computers in Chemistry (SJSU), undergraduate physical chemistry (SJSU), technical communication for chemistry majors (SJSU), graduate Intro to Computational Chemistry (SJSU), all 3 levels of undergraduate physical chemistry offered at UC Irvine (quantum mechanics, kinetics/thermo/stat. mech., and applications in spectroscopy), graduate thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, computational chemistry, general chemistry, and organic chemistry. I have served as the math professor for the St. Thomas of Villanova Scholars (STOVS) program, a summer bridge program at Villanova University. Additionally, I have some less conventional teaching experience, such as working as a guitar instructor and even as host/writer/co-creator of an educational web series called Shredded Science. All of these experiences have contributed to the formation of my teaching philosophy, but my teaching philosophy has not only been shaped by experience. It has also been shaped by the formal training in practicing student-centered inclusive pedagogy that I received as a UC Irvine Pedagogical Fellow. The program consisted of a full year of graduate coursework in advanced pedagogy, as well as designing and leading training sessions for two incoming classes of chemistry graduate students, in preparation for their role as teaching assistants. The pedagogy courses were focused on the implementation of active learning models of education in the classroom, and building student-centered curricula around student learning outcomes.

I also use one of the skills I developed as a researcher, my ability to write computer code, to help bring some of the more mathematically rigorous concepts in physical chemistry to life using animations, graphical user interfaces for mathematical concepts (see Teaching Tools), and creative data visualizations. An example of one of these GUI-based teaching tools is demonstrated in the video below. The tool demonstrates chemical systems favoring the most degenerate energetic states in statistical mechanics using a code that I wrote code which simulates someone shaking a shoebox of coins repeatedly (below). The students learn that the coins will favor the highest entropy configuration (half heads, half tails) with increasing likelihood as the number of quarters in the box increases. This simulation can be used as a starting point for class conversation for introducing difficult concepts like entropy, under-sampling in molecular dynamics simulations, and even ergodicity!