Teaching

Listen to me talk about my how upconversion can improve solar cell efficiency in this UD Rise and Science podcast! I enjoy presenting my work on campus and at conferences, so when the on-campus radio station asked to interview me for one of their graduate student profiles, I volunteered!

Teaching Philosophy

As an educator, my goal is to not only disseminate information in materials science, but also to motivate students to delve more deeply into understanding everyday scientific phenomena. Whether teaching undergraduate or graduate students, I will bolster their prior foundational knowledge and draw attention to new connections between the structure of materials and their macroscopic properties. 

Why is diamond the hardest substance? 

How do solar cells work? 

What is the next ground-breaking technology? 

The goal of my materials science and engineering classes is to create an intellectual ‘springboard’ (i.e. frame of mind) that students can use to continue exploring further scientific concepts in their field of study. As the principal investigator of a research group, my goal is to expand upon the knowledge base of materials science by understanding the most fundamental light-matter phenomena by observing and explaining them first in nanoscale materials. When advising undergraduate and graduate students in my group, I will guide the development of their dissertation topic to contribute to this knowledge base ‘expansion’ and in the latter years, a pursuit of their career goals. As the students design independent experiments and encounter unseen optical phenomena, I will provide larger picture directions (whether we are researching fundamental science or designing a scalable device) to guide students towards the next research step in generating enough data to support their new findings.