Teaching

Over the years, I have had the privilege to teach a number of students in various capacities. This includes leading graduate and undergraduate courses as well as classes and programs for middle and high school students. These experiences have all shaped who I am and how I think about teaching and learning. This is an essential part of my work as an academic, I am always striving to improve as an instructor by learning from previous experiences and from others. 

Here is a reflection on teaching in the classroom

Here is a reflection on teaching outside the classroom

Here is a reflection on learning

Some of the highlights of my teaching career are listed below in reverse-chronological order.

Engineering Design VI

Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology, 2016-2023

This is a third-year undergraduate course for Engineering Management students at Stevens. The course guides students through the process of designing a new product, starting with identifying a problem to be solved and ending with a detailed design and viable business plan for how to bring it to market. Individual assignments involve students reflecting on different parts of the design process, as well as the structure of the design process itself, and a team project allows the students to work together to realize a new product. As a new instructor taking over the course in Spring 2016, I re-designed the structure and content, delivered the material, and facilitated in-class exercises.

Optimization Principles in Systems Design

Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology, 2017-2023

This is a graduate course for Systems Engineering, Engineering Management, and Mechanical Engineering students at Stevens, which teaches students how to formulate, solve, and integrate numerical optimization tools into practical design problems. Students learn about the mathematical foundations of modern algorithms, including pattern search methods, derivative-based approaches, and population-based methods such as genetic algorithms. By the end of the semester, they are able to take a design problem and formulate it as an optimization problem, select the most appropriate algorithm, code and solve the optimization problem using MATLAB or Python, and interpret the results.

Decision & Risk Analysis

Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology, 2016-2022

This is a graduate course for the Systems Engineering and Engineering Management programs at Stevens, which teaches students how to work through the process of making decisions, which involves structuring the decision and its objectives, identifying the best alternatives, assessing multi-attribute utility functions to understand trade-offs among competing objectives, and identifying and evaluating risks.

Product Design Optimization

Instructor and Examiner, Chalmers University of Technology, Spring 2014

This was a Ph.D.-level course with students from several Swedish universities and companies, focusing on design optimization and product development. The course covered practical aspects of design optimization, including ways to turn design problems into well-formulated optimization problems, sampling design spaces and constructing surrogate models, basic theory behind gradient-based and gradient-free optimization algorithms, criteria for choosing algorithms, implementing these tools in Excel and MATLAB, accounting for uncertainty, multiple objectives, systems, and shapes, and interpreting solutions. The students were examined on the course contents and given the opportunity to implement their knowledge through a term project of their choice. As the sole instructor, I designed the structure of the course, prepared lecture notes and exercises, and carried out the course with approximately 50 student contact hours.

Engineering Design Optimization

Instructor, Chalmers University of Technology, Fall 2013

This was a completely new master-level course with students from three programs at Chalmers: Applied Mechanics, Materials Science, and Product Development. The course focused on engineering design and how to use optimization as part of the design process. This included engineering design processes, formulating design problems, selecting appropriate materials, analyzing optimization formulations, sampling spaces and creating surrogate models, understanding basic principles and theory of optimization algorithms, choosing algorithms, and solving different types of problems. As the main lecturer of the course, I co-designed the structure of the course, prepared and delivered half of the lectures and workshops, and prepared and evaluated exams with approximately 25 student contact hours.

Product Development Project

Project Supervisor, Chalmers University of Technology, Winters 2013 & 2014

This course was for all first-year students in the Product Development master program at Chalmers. The course guides students through the process of product development from need-finding to developing and testing prototypes and stating a business case, primarily through an industry-sponsored project. As a supervisor, I was responsible for guiding one team each year through the process as a consultant and mentor, as well as grading the final project reports. In both of my years as a supervisor, my teams worked with start-up med-tech companies, one developing a device for neo-natal resuscitation and the other a tool to guide surgeons in joint replacement procedures.