Teaching and Education

Student Resources

I strive to assist students in identifying opportunities to further their skills outside of the traditional classroom environment. To that end, I have put together several webpages providing information regarding undergraduate and graduate scholarships, student research opportunities, applying to graduate school, and post-doctoral fellowships. Links to these resources may be found below. Please feel free to share these resources and contact me with any corrections and/or additions to each list. Please note that I only accept submissions that are specific to the atmospheric and related sciences and are available to students beyond a single institution.

Student Research Internships | Undergraduate Scholarships
Graduate Fellowships and Post-Docs | Applying to Graduate School

Teaching Philosophy

Students flourish in academic environments when they know that those in charge – their instructors, advisors, and mentors – care deeply about them as people, their well-being, and their learning. Students are not automatons wired just to learn, but rather, they bring their unique identities, financial and psychological hardships, motivations, and preparation levels to the academic setting, all of which affect their engagement. This is particularly true of students from historically excluded backgrounds, who often do not have someone to whom they can turn to help in navigating college and adulthood. Consequently, my teaching and mentoring approach is foremost rooted in nurturing an inclusive, supportive academic community through which students tangibly experience my passion and care for them as people and their education.

This inclusive, supportive academic community enables the teaching and mentoring methods I use to have the best-possible chance at facilitating students’ academic success. These methods are grounded in developing students’ ability to critically evaluate ideas and creatively apply knowledge to reinforce existing and develop altogether new understanding. I leverage insights from pedagogy and human cognition in designing my courses to help students achieve these goals.

The courses I teach are centered in Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. This starts with organizing each course around a small number of specific learning objectives that provide a framework around which topics are organized (rather than the inverse). Achieving these outcomes, however, requires students to first have a solid foundation at the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, specifically remembering and understanding. Thus, I intentionally design courses using a scaffolded approach, limiting my assumptions about students’ prior learning to ensure we begin on solid ground, then explicitly connecting each new concept to those that preceded it in their studies. Further, since learning is best achieved through repeated, appropriately spaced application instead of cramming and memorization, my courses emphasize repeated practice through low-stakes assessments and assignments. Emphasizing repeated practice also gives me multiple opportunities to assess when a concept is not resonating with students and to provide immediate corrective feedback.

I typically teach three courses per year in my areas of expertise, including our two-semester core synoptic meteorology sequence, electives in tropical and mesoscale meteorology, and a graduate-level numerical weather prediction course. I also teach our program’s freshman-level introductory seminar course. Although I adapt my teaching methods to each student cohort, I strongly believe in introducing key physical concepts using a variety of methods and engaging students through activities that apply these concepts to real-world situations.