A very brief bio

Curriculum Vitae

As Director of Graduate Education for the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences I oversee the academic progress of over 500 students across all the school's PhD-granting areas and programs.

As Lecturer on Engineering and Applied Sciences I teach the SEAS Teaching Practicum (EngSci 301 ) each year.  The course is designed for SEAS graduate students, but is open to all natural science students in GSAS and is auditable by postdocs and undergraduates interested in teaching science and engineering.  I also co-teach Computer Science 290, a seminar for first-year PhD students on research practices and academic culture.

My astrophysical research was focussed on simulating dense stellar clusters such as might be found near the centres of massive galaxies, incorporating a variety of physical effects, including stellar collisions and mergers as seeds of massive black holes.

Pedagogically, while at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning I published on how metacognition relates to instruction and learning groups, on the dissemination of results from cognitive science to faculty instructors, and on the institutional placement of centers for teaching and learning.  I was co-PI on a CGS/Sloan grant to Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to develop future-faculty-type training on classroom assessment methods and also developed and taught courses and workshops on course design and science teaching.