Teaching

I teach environmental science in the Department of Natural Sciences at Baruch College (CUNY), where I have been on the faculty since Fall 2023.

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy grows out of my experience as a first-generation undergraduate and graduate student. I often felt discouraged when professors began a lecture on an unfamiliar topic by saying “as you all learned in high school.” Success in environmental science requires a base level of comfort with several basic sciences, so I know that many of my students will meet a seemingly “basic” scientific concept for the first time in my classroom. My goal as a teacher is to make environmental science accessible to all students, regardless of prior experience.

Inclusion is a guiding practice in how I design my courses, informed by my training at Williams College and the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Inclusive Pedagogy Seminar (Spring 2023). I build in consistent structure and as many chances for low-stakes engagement with the material as possible: partially filled-in lecture notes that students complete as I lecture, daily quizzes graded for completion, annotated pre-class readings, live polling, and interactive activities, problem-solving, and discussions, even in lectures of nearly 100 students. In my upper-level courses, students design, carry out, analyze, and present their own semester-long science projects.

I also teach the “hidden curriculum” of science. Many students first discover research in my classes as seniors and tell me they want to go on to a PhD, but much of the preparation that gets students there, like summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) and contacting potential PhD advisors, happens before senior year. So even in my 3000-level courses, I show students what doing research is really like: taking an experiment from proposal through presentation, watching their own samples run at a research facility, and writing a mock grant proposal that introduces funding opportunities such as the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. I think it is essential that students get this information through hands-on experience early in their undergraduate careers.

Courses at Baruch

Courses I Developed

BIO/ENV/PHY 3062: Astrobiology

New course, approved 2024 · Taught Spring 2026

How do we search for life on other planets, when the only example of life we have is on Earth? In this course, we explore the chemical, visual, and physical signatures that indicate something is “alive” on Earth, to understand how scientists look for these signatures on other planets. In the lab, students analyze chemical, visual, and data-based biosignatures. Students may take the course once, for BIO, ENV, or PHY credit.

Research in the course: I take students through an entire research experiment using laboratory-grown microbial mats, from proposal and design to execution, data analysis, and a poster presentation. This includes a trip to the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC), where students see their own samples run on a gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer and tour the facility. Later in the semester, students write a mock NASA grant proposal, and we take field trips to the American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center and the Intrepid Museum’s Apollo exhibit.

ENV/PHY 3060: Earth Systems

New course, approved 2024 · Semester TBD

Earth’s climate and ecosystems are shaped by connections between the land, oceans, atmosphere, and living things (“Earth systems”). In this course, we explore how these connections make our planet habitable, and the effects of natural and human-induced changes to these systems. In the lab, students use computational tools to visualize and model the effects of human activity on natural systems. It is the first course at Baruch to focus explicitly on the scientific basis for climate change, and it is project-based: students model a disturbance to an Earth system, visualize the evidence for climate change, and choose an Earth system to teach to the class.

IDC 4010: The Susan Locke Interdisciplinary Capstone in Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change — Scientific Reasoning in Paleoclimatology

Co-taught with Professor Dan Li (Philosophy) · Spring 2025

The Earth is warming at an unprecedented speed. Scientists know this because they can reconstruct past climate and compare it with current climate: the field of paleoclimatology. What are their methods, and how do we know how reliable those methods are? Dan Li and I built this course from scratch to introduce students to paleoclimatology and to the uncertainty and rigor of its scientific methods.

Research in the course: Students took a day-long field trip to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Sanctuary Forest, working with the LDEO Tree Ring Lab to observe and practice the full tree-ring research process: collecting cores from trees, analyzing their rings for evidence of past climate, and analyzing the data. Students then built their own tree-ring chronologies and used them to ask questions about past climate, applying the principles of scientific reasoning taught by Professor Li. Two students went on to paid summer research positions in paleoclimate at LDEO as a direct result of meeting the researchers on this trip.

Introductory Courses

ENV 1003: Fundamentals of Ecology

Taught Fall 2023, Summer 2024, Fall 2024, and Fall 2025

Fundamentals of Ecology explores ecological characteristics and ecosystem processes through an evolutionary lens. The course shows the interdisciplinary nature of ecology by highlighting its significance to current environmental issues and the interconnectedness of the environment around us.

ENV 1004: Fundamentals of Ecological Research

Taught Spring 2024, Summer 2024, and Summer 2026

Fundamentals of Ecological Research is a hands-on course that teaches the basic concepts and methods used in ecology. Throughout the course, we stress the significance of ecological research to current environmental issues, both local and global.

Research Opportunities for Students

I did not know what research was before starting my undergraduate career, and I am only where I am today because mentors specifically created welcoming research environments.

Since Spring 2024, Baruch undergraduates have carried out research in my lab, the Baruch Microbial Biogeochemistry Lab. Projects generally use microbial cultures and stable carbon isotopes to answer questions in biogeochemistry, often with collaborators at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, and the Hudson River Park Trust. Many of my research students first met my research in Astrobiology. Read more about our research.

I am currently taking only 2–4 independent study students for Spring 2027. You can express interest in future semesters or a senior thesis using the interest form.

How students have worked in the lab

Details and the interest form: Join the Lab.

Presenting your work

Research students share their work publicly. Each spring, students from my lab have presented at the Northeast Geobiology Symposium, a small regional conference (at Yale University in 2024, McGill University in 2025, and Rowan University in 2026), and at Baruch’s Creative Inquiry Day. I place special emphasis on what comes next, and I mentor students directly through applications to graduate and postgraduate programs. My former research students have gone on to funded master’s programs, postbaccalaureate research fellowships, PhD applications, and environmental jobs in New York City.

Find more on Environmental Science classes and research at Baruch at baruchenv.com.

Previous Teaching

Williams College — Visiting Assistant Professor (2022–2023)

GEOS 308: Life on Mars?

New course I designed · Taught Spring 2023

On February 18, 2021, the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater on Mars with the objective to “seek signs of ancient life.” In this course, we investigated what “signs” would point to ancient or modern life, both on the Martian surface and in the chemistry of any samples eventually returned to Earth, from Earth analogues for Mars environments to the potential for modern subsurface life on Mars. In lab, students grew their own microbial mats and characterized the visual and chemical characteristics that make them “alive,” and as a final project, they prepared a mock manuscript for the journal Astrobiology.

At Williams, I advised a senior honors thesis on extracellular sugars and cyanobacterial sinking rates in the laboratory and the Sargasso Sea. Baruch students have since collected follow-up data for that project, and we are preparing it for publication.

Harvard University