Teaching and mentoring

My teaching philosophy centers on three principles: students learn through explaining ideas themselves, effective teaching requires adapting to individual learners, and understanding depends on synthesizing concepts across topics rather than memorizing isolated facts. In practice, I use prediction and explanation prompts, short presentations, and assignments that require students to compare theories and integrate material across lectures. Much of my teaching experience comes from mentoring undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, and graduate researchers in experimental design, programming, MRI analysis, statistics, data interpretation, and scientific writing. I have also delivered guest lectures on memory, cognitive aging, spatial navigation, neuroscience, and virtual reality. I am currently completing the University of Arizona Postdoc Pathways Program through the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), which provides training in evidence-based STEM teaching and culminates in a mentored co-teaching practicum.

Service to Early career researchers and Community outreach

My service focuses on supporting early-career researchers and communicating science beyond the lab and classroom. Clear and accessible scientific communication is especially important to me, both for helping researchers engage with one another and for making neuroscience more understandable and relevant to the broader public. I currently chair the Journal of Neuroscience Early Career Researcher Advisory Board and co-lead the upcoming ECR Voices series, which highlights issues that affect researchers during graduate, postdoctoral, and tenure-track career stages and provides a forum for discussion of mentorship, publishing, open science, and other aspects of academic life.

I am also actively involved in outreach and connecting with the local community. I coordinate a psychology lecture series for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), a continuing-education program for older adults in Tucson, AZ, where I help organize accessible presentations on current topics in psychology and neuroscience. I also regularly give public talks in retirement communities on memory, cognitive aging, and the aging brain. These experiences are an important part of my broader goal of making research on aging accessible to the people most directly affected by it.