Lifelong learning is a program that organizes public lectures on astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology for a senior audience at various libraries in the Chicagoland area. I gave a virtual talk for this program in Spring 2022, and have been a co-organizer for the series during the 2022-2023 academic year.

I was a founding member and co-director of the MIT Sidewalk Astronomy Club from 2017 - 2020. The purpose of this program was to set up free public stargazing sessions on the streets of the Boston/Cambridge area. During this time, we organized 10+ stargazing sessions for the public, attended by 400+ people in total. We also organized hands-on activities/exhibits for local students and science fairs, in partnership with the Cambridge Science Festival, the STEAM Ahead summer program, and the Latino STEM Alliance. You can find some pictures from our outings below. 




 

I was the instructor for the Astrophysics course in the MIT MOSTEC program for four summers (2015 - 2018) in graduate school. The program was an online summer course for rising seniors in high school, aimed at providing students from under-represented or under-resourced communities a hands-on introduction to upper-level science. I was involved in developing/updating the curriculum, designing interactive online teaching sessions, and mentoring students to build toward a final presentation of their independent research projects at MIT. You can find some images/results the students made below (image of the Cassaiopeia A supernovae remnant, spectrum of an accretion disk, blackbody + absorption model fits to an X-ray spectrum). As part of this program, I also organized three in-person workshops where students derived the properties of a transiting exoplanet using real transit data. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in any of the course material.  

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I have given multiple public talks geared for a range of audiences, including at the MIT Independent Activities Period, the SRMP program, and as mentioned above, the Lifelong Learning program at UChicago. I have also helped set up astronomy booths at some local events.

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If you're interested in having me speak to your class/group to discuss any recent space discoveries (or astronomy in general), please let me know!

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I also enjoy teaching. I was a teaching assistant for five semesters in graduate school for the introductory Mechanics, Electricity & Magnetism, and Techniques of Observational Astronomy courses. I spent a lot of time teaching or advising students in these roles, since these courses were either taught in a flipped classroom/interactive learning setting (read more here), or were heavily project-based. The Observational Astronomy course involved students writing project proposals, taking data at the MIT Wallace Observatory, analyzing the data, and then writing up a journal-stlye article on their findings. I have also given a few guest lectures for astronomy courses at UChicago.