I led the lab section of the advanced geomorphology class taught by Prof. Ken Ferrier in Spring 2018 at Georgia Tech. This was my very first formal teaching experience, and I enjoyed and learned a lot about the teaching process. In the picture above, I was explaining to the students the nuts and bolts of the Finite Difference Method (FEM) that was used to numerically solve the 1D hillslope diffusion equation. Through my teaching, I want to make sure students know more than tweaking the parameters of a model handed to them. By helping students to internalize the underlying physical, mathematical and algorithmic ways of thinking, students will gradually become equipped with the ability to formulate new models and solve new problems!  The students had 3 - 4 weeks to work on each lab project, which gave them plenty of room and freedom to explore the topic of interest in each lab and discuss questions they may have with me during my office hours.  Not a single office hour went by without a student stopping by with questions!

I led a lab section of an introductory planetary science course taught by Prof. James Wray, which is aimed at undergraduate students across various majors on Georgia Tech campus. The overarching goal of this course is a grand one. It leads the students on an cosmic intellectual trip to understand the composition and evolution of stars and planets, and what conditions make a particular planet habitable. The trip they embarked on was in a large part fueled by the basic physics, chemistry and math they had learned in high school and during the first year of college.  I love explaining the fundamental physical principles and mathematical tools at the beginning of each lab section as they usually underpin what comes later in the lab. As in the cover photo at the top of this page, some lab sections come with simple hands-on experiments from which students can see the physical principles at play right on site! I still remember the smile on my face when I was grading a student's assignment who demonstrated the principle of the Doppler Effect that underlies the radial velocity detection of exoplanets in a fun and expressive cartoon drawing (photo above). 

Hey look! That silvery gray mineral with metallic luster in the middle of the board is galena, the state mineral of Wisconsin! Of course, I wouldn't reveal the answer to the students in the lab so easily. They would form small groups and take turns to identify minerals on this 3 by 3 Tic-Tac-Toe "board". Understanding the geology beneath your feet and the inner workings of the natural environment around you offers great intellectual satisfaction,  which sometimes translates into real-world applications and solutions to challenging environmental issues our Earthlings are facing today. That is the type of thinking I was trying to impart to the students. The students in this class were mostly non-geoscience majors and undergrads who hadn't yet declared a major. Prof. Ken Ferrier and I led them on a whirlwind tour of a wide range of topics in Earth and environmental sciences in Fall 2019. I couldn't feel prouder when a student creatively weaved the geoscience concepts he learned in the class into a song he composed and performed on guitar (video embedded above).