Teaching

In my position as teaching faculty at the University of Notre Dame, I primarily serve the needs of the Neuroscience and Behavior major. I have developed four new upper-level electives and taken on roles teaching two larger content-level courses, including a core course for the major. I am in the process of developing another two interdisciplinary courses to be launched in Spring 2024 and Spring 2025, and have additionally facilitated a new pre-college course in Neuroscience. My primary goal is to integrate the teaching of psychology and neuroscience with opportunities for both community engagement and science communication, to provide concreteness to what students are learning.

I am involved in continued professional development through my participation in the greater neuroscience and psychology teaching community. In particular, I have received a grant from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology to develop an instructional resource, and I regularly present at the Neuroscience Teaching Conference on initiatives that have sprung from our work at Notre Dame.

Prior to my appointment at Notre Dame, my work in teaching has primarily been as a teaching assistant in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. I have been a TA for various first- and second-year courses such as Statistics, Learning and Plasticity, and Physiological Psychology. On several occasions I have been able to give guest lectures to students, which I have found to be very rewarding experiences. I have also taught Cognitive Neuroscience as a course instructor for the Department of Psychology on two separate occasions (Winter 2019 and Winter 2020 terms).

I have completed the Advanced Undergraduate Teaching Program certificate. Through this program, I learned about structuring courses, lesson planning, and effective teaching strategies that I continue to employ in my classroom settings. I have also completed Teaching in Higher Education to continue updating and developing my teaching skills, as well as engaging with current topics in post-secondary education. I have also branched into the scholarship of teaching and learning in a project with Dr. Suzanne Wood on developing and testing the efficacy of sequential writing assignments in improving students’ critical reading skills, and am currently working on some initiatives with Dr. Rachel Branco (see Research).