Teaching

You can read my full teaching philosophy here, but here’s a tl;dr

• The map of knowledge in cognitive science changes every day, so it’s best to teach cartography

• If education follows Goodhart’s law, we need to make learning, not material outputs the target in each classroom

• In order to meet these two goals, I run an adaptive classroom and actively seek ways to scaffold learning by embedding course material in the broader context of students’ lives and interests

I have extensive teaching and mentoring experience

College Students

• As a PhD student at Dartmouth, I have TA’d Computational Neuroscience and Introduction to Psychology Research Methods. For the Computational Neuroscience course, I rewrote significant sections of the curriculum, have delivered several solo lectures, and have developed a robust and fair generative AI policy. For my work on this course, I earned my department’s graduate teaching award, and I have been nominated by my students as an Outstanding Graduate Teacher twice.

• I have mentored 9 undergraduate RAs, two of whom completed their senior theses under my direction
• Ash Chinta (2025): Understanding ADHD through a naturalistic semantic foraging task: behavioral and neural insights
• Anna Katherine Ray (2024): Metastereotyping, anticipatory epistemic injustice, and defensive storytelling: Narrative to bridge social divides

• I have taught two guest lectures in Dartmouth’s Comparative Literature department on how narratorial choices shape a reader’s theory of character’s minds.

• I have also served on MIT’s Presidential Committee for Distinguished Fellowships since 2021, advising undergraduate students who are applying for foreign fellowships.

• As a master’s student at Oxford, I taught undergraduate tutorials on the psychology of language.

• As an undergraduate at MIT, I served as a First Year Advisor for three years. I additionally served on the First Year Advising Steering Committee and was awarded Outstanding Associate Advisor of the Year in 2019.

Middle and High School Students

• I worked as a teacher and curriculum developer for Inspirit AI from 2020-2022; I designed and taught two courses: a 10-week intensive experiential learning curriculum that introduced high school students to AI ethics issues via coding projects, and a 5-week project for advanced students focused on building pose-estimation models for NASA astronauts.

• I additionally served as a 1-on-1 research mentor for 7 Inspirit AI high school students in 2023; 3 of which have resulted in publications/preprints:
• Differences in predicted rates of vaginal births after cesarean across racial groups in ‘race-neutral’ model by Anjali Suresh
• Value, Homo Economicus, and Agent-Based Modeling: The Importance of Re-evaluating the Value Systems of AI by Ahan Devgun
• Exposing Ethnicity-linked Undercounts in the 2020 US Census through Regression Modeling by Tarun Shah

• In 2021, I co-taught a 5-week course on Science, Science Fiction, and Social Justice for middle schoolers through the MIT Educational Studies Program .

• I worked as a teacher and program coordinator for MIT’s Academic Teaching Initiative from 2015-2019. I taught SAT Critical Reading courses for local high schoolers and coordinated the organization’s SAT II preparation program.

• Throughout college, I gave one-off lectures on popular psychology topics for visiting middle and high school students.