Teaching and Mentoring

Through my previous experiences, I have had the opportunity to teach a wide range of students, including K-12, undergraduate, graduate, professional students, and members of the public in both formal and informal settings. The teachers who had the greatest impact on me as a scientist were those who transferred their excitement and passion for learning. As a teacher, my goal is to build a supportive, inclusive environment where students can experience this same excitement and life-long curiosity and where all students can succeed.

PEDAGOGICAL Training

Christina is excited to help students synthesize and connect principles learned in class, and has pursued several opportunities to develop evidence-based teaching practices. As a graduate student she completed STEP-UP, an evidence-based teaching pedagogy class that provided frameworks for designing curriculum, assessing student learning, and creating an inclusive environment for historically excluded students. Christina was also a founding member of the Science Education Journal Club, a group that met monthly to discuss topics in evidence-based teaching and STEM education research. As a postdoctoral fellow, Christina completed the “Scientists Teaching Science” pedagogy class, which explored subjects such as inquiry-based science, classroom dynamics, cultural awareness and diversity; as well as completing workshops on mentoring dynamics and scientific management.

K-12 Science EducatioN

As co-president of her college’s Women in Science student group, Christina established a mentoring program at a local middle school that paired middle-school girls with undergraduate women majoring in STEM disciplines. As a graduate student, she participated in the university’s Science Education Partnership (SEP) program. Through this program, Christina co-planned and co-taught hands-on lessons to both elementary and middle school students, including teaching at several Title I schools. Throughout these activities, she had the opportunity to up-end the paradigm that science is merely a “collection of facts,” and instead show students that science is a dynamic and ever-changing process that encompasses the world around them. In her last year of graduate school, Christina pioneered a new program to bring SEP volunteers and resources to patients in the Children’s hospital one-room schoolroom. The initial pilot was a huge success, and this program has continued and expanded. Not only did this initiative bring hands-on science to the hospital, but it allowed the hospitalized children to connect to their peers in the public school.

Undergraduate and Graduate Science Education

As an undergraduate, Christina served as a teaching assistant for laboratory sections of general chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry, as well as a Chemistry Department tutor. It was rewarding to help students master materials that she had also previously worked hard to understand. During her senior year, Christina assisted in redesigning the biochemistry lab curriculum to include research questions based off her own thesis project. The Chemistry Department, in recognition of her TA and tutoring efforts, awarded me the “Outstanding Student Teacher” award upon graduation. In graduate school, Christina served as a teaching assistant to a physical chemistry class for first-year pharmacy students. In addition to teaching PharmD students, she also served for two years as the course director for the entirely senior-student led chemical biology grad student “bootcamp.” Christina was responsible for designing the curriculum based upon the profile of the incoming class, recruiting and training senior students as topic-specific lecturers, and provided feedback on student presentations.

Public Education and Outreach

Mentoring

Christina was fortunate to have caring mentors at critical points in her education, and mentoring students in both the classroom and the research lab has been a highlight of her career. As a postdoc, Christina has mentored multiple students at the NIH through programs such as the Cancer Research Training Award and the Introduction to Cancer Research Careers. Through these programs, she has assisted mentees in learning core experimental techniques, designing testable hypotheses, and communicating their results to different audiences. Many of her mentees have continued onto programs in graduate or medical education, and all of her trainees have contributed to publications and are listed as co-authors on manuscripts.