Teaching
As an instructor in graduate level courses, my guiding principle is to impart the skills required for PhD researchers to create new and valuable knowledge. This assumes that their fundamental knowledge in math, chemistry and biology are sound and have been acquired earlier in their training, or that they will know how to fill in their knowledge gaps with appropriate resources. My teaching goals in both the classroom and the laboratory are as follows:1) Identify important questions worth answering.
2) Construct a framework for answering the question: experimental versus computational, required assumptions or perquisitions, long term versus immediate goals, potential upside, risks et cetera.
3) Design a strategy to tackling the problem, either experimentally or computationally.
4) Critically interpret the data that arises from three, identifying the best- and worst-case scenario that the data might be revealing.
5) Draw conclusions and identify the next questions that arise.
Throughout this workflow, my role is to act as a facilitator for the student to think and develop their own skills for scientific inquiry. In this role, the top priority is for me to inspire the student, to convince them of the significance (or insignificance) or the question they are pursuing, to empower them to become independent scientists capable not only of doing, but more importantly of thinking. Based on my experience, my responsibility is to help them identify pitfalls that lead to poor data quality or faulty interpretation.
In the classroom, I teach only graduate level courses. In this setting, I do not believe that didactic learning is effective nor required anymore. Facts and knowledge can be found in books and in the web, how to synthesize this knowledge to to use case studies of major breakthroughs in the field of discussion and tell the students how the scientists behind those discoveries arrived at their conclusions, highlighting their rationale, and even mistakes that were made along the way. In the lab, where I do most of my instruction, the pedagogy outlined above is executed by spending hours each week sitting with students. Each meeting starts with: “What was the question you hoped to answer this week?” This is crucial to helping students (many who have been educated in the didactic fashion) to think rather than to do, to take ownership
of their discovery journey, and to see the big picture. This is then followed by looking at data, interrogating them about controls and biases, providing alternative interpretations that are counter to their hypotheses, challenging their assumptions, and finally making plans for the next follow-up experiment to strengthen the previous one. Research is full of ups and downs. For many PhD students, the lows are often more frequent than the highs.
My role as a mentor is to motivate and encourage, to help them celebrate and dwell in the moments of success which inject energy and zest into them. From experience, these inspired moments are more than enough to get through the doldrums that are also, and unfortunately, germane to the life of a scientist.