Teaching and Mentorship

Teaching

I am energized by teaching and look forward to having students discover new skills and concepts in geography and environmental science. I have four years of experience as a teaching assistant in the Department of Geography at UC Santa Barbara, and receiving the Department's Excellence in Teaching in Geography award in 2018. 

In my teaching, I have led: 

• Lab sections in various levels of environmental remote sensing courses, from introductory to advanced (Remote Sensing of the Environment 1, 2, and 3). Students learn geospatial image analysis, principles of light interactions and spectra, and environmental data science skills, developing their own group projects at the end of the course series.

• Interpretive lab planning and discussion from urban ecosystems (Urban Environment). Students are guided to interpret sites in local urban/suburban neighborhoods, take measurements referencing their environment, and write up blog-style posts to share with other students, all while keeping in mind how light, water, and plants interact.

• Interactive discussion sections in introductory physical geography (Land, Water, and Life). Students discuss a breadth of topics on the basics of the climate system, hydrology, and earth structure and geomorphology.

I also always strive to improve my teaching, and have in taken a university-level education course (College and University Teaching from Theory to Practice) to refine my skills in developing effective and engaging lesson plans, group projects, and course syllabus structuring, among other topics. 

Mentorship

Beyond formal teaching, I have been a mentor to undergraduate students at the NASA Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Barbara.

NASA Student Airborne Research Program (SARP):

In this summer program, undergraduate STEM students develop projects to solve scientific problems with remote sensing and atmospheric chemistry techniques acquired from NASA sensors. I was the research mentor for the land remote sensing group for two summers (2016 and 2017), assisting 8 students each summer to learn remote sensing data analysis and applying it to airborne hyperspectral data and satellite time series, looking into questions related to land cover change, fire, drought, vegetation classification, and more. Several projects were presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

UC Berkeley, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management: 

In my postdoc, I have worked with undergraduate students on their senior theses to (1) investigate vegetation responses to drought at varying time scales, from rapid-onset flash droughts to long-term year-over-year changes using eddy covariance flux tower data, and (2) address relationships between urban heat and vegetation cover in the Bay Area.

UC Santa Barbara, Department of Geography: 

During graduate school, I mentored an undergraduate student to expand on my previous research related to my master's thesis, specifically estimating urban gross primary productivity and light use efficiency based on high spatial resolution analyses from WorldView-2 and expanding the time range with MODIS satellite data.