Teaching


Teaching Philosophy

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.

The (probably overused) above quote from John Tukey captures not only what I love most about statistics, but also my approach to teaching undergraduate statistics. My teaching seeks to connect statistics to students’ lives and interests, and I am focused on helping them understand the bigger picture of their work. In an introductory course, this involves having students work together and think deeply about what conclusions they can and cannot draw from their analyses, and the non-statistical impact those conclusions might have. Similarly, in an upper-level undergraduate data mining course, I encouraged students to think carefully about tradeoffs between model performance and interpretability, and brought in news stories highlighting ethical issues in data science.

Over summer 2020, I worked with Jack Miller, Ph.D., to redesign the University of Michigan’s introductory statistics course (STATS 250) to focus on simulation-based inference, and to move labs and other activities to more deeply integrate R via RStudio. Through this work, I’m able to make a strong impact on how we engage learners in statistics, and get them excited about a course they may have been told to fear. Concurrently, I am working with other graduate students at Michigan to develop a mentorship program for Graduate Student Instructors to focus on evidence-based and inclusive teaching strategies to better cultivate the next generation of statisticians.

Courses Taught

 
 
 
 
 
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Seminar on Statistical Methods for Mental Health
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Sep 2022 – Oct 2022 First Term, AY 2022-2023

Primary instructor with Trang Q. Nguyen

8-week hour-long seminar for masters and doctoral students in mental health. The topic was “Promises and Pitfalls of Prediction Models in Mental Health”.

 
 
 
 
 
University of Michigan
STATS 250: Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis
University of Michigan
Sep 2019 – Apr 2021 Spring 2018, AY 2019-20, AY 2020-21

Graduate Student Instructor

Large, non-calculus-based, cross-disciplinary introductory statistics course. Taught 2-3 weekly lab sessions of 30 students each.

Course Instructors: Jack Miller, Ph.D.; Brenda Gunderson, Ph.D.

Fall 2020 Slides

 
 
 
 
 
Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, ICPSR
Multilevel Models I: Introduction and Application
Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, ICPSR
Jun 2018 – Jul 2019 Summer 2018, Summer 2019

Teaching Assistant

Four-week project-based course for political and social scientists interested in mixed modeling. Held daily office hours to assist students with project-based learning.

Course Instructor: Mark Manning, Ph.D.

 
 
 
 
 
Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, ICPSR
Introduction to the R Statistical Computing Environment
Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, ICPSR
Jun 2018 – Jul 2019 Summer 2018, Summer 2019

Teaching Assistant

Two-week lecture series on graphics, data management, modeling, etc., in R. Held daily office hours.

Course Instructor: John Fox, Ph.D.

 
 
 
 
 
University of Michigan
STATS 415: Data Mining
University of Michigan
Jan 2018 – Apr 2018 Winter 2018

Graduate Student Instructor

Upper-level undergraduate introductory machine learning course using An Introduction to Statistical Learning (James, Witten, Hastie, Tibshirani). Taught weekly lab session for approximately 45 students.

Course Instructor: Liza Levina, Ph.D.

 
 
 
 
 
University of Michigan
STATS 500: Statistical Learning I: Regression
University of Michigan
Sep 2017 – Dec 2017 Fall 2017

Graduate Student Instructor

First graduate-level regression course for Applied Statistics masters students, using Linear Models with R, 2nd ed. (Faraway). Held weekly office hours and graded homework and exams.

Course Instructor: Brian Thelan, Ph.D.

 
 
 
 
 
University of Notre Dame
BIOS 40411: Biostatistics
University of Notre Dame
Sep 2017 – Dec 2017 Fall 2017

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

Senior undergraduate-level introductory biostatistics course for biology and life science majors. Co-taught weekly lab sessions with a graduate TA, graded lab reports.

Course Instructor: Gary Lamberti, Ph.D.