I am extremely passionate about teaching.
I’ve trained many students in the EEG lab, taught many courses in Linguistics and Cognitive Science, and mentored and advised undergraduate students. I’ve also had incredible freedom to create my own courses and course content, which I have enjoyed tremendously.
Below are descriptions of some of the courses I’ve taught or TA-ed.
Cognitive Science – A Multidisciplinary Introduction
Instructor: Fall 2022-Fall 2023, Summer 2020-2023
Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Introduction gives students an overview of the history, scope, challenges, and debates of cognitive science. We cover topics from a breadth of cognitive science-adjacent fields from philosophy to psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience, all under the framing of treating the human mind as an information processing system.
Lecture 1: What is Cognitive Science?TA: Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022
I have also TA’ed the same course in the past. As TA, I ran discussion sections and worked with the department to create a repository of classroom materials, including discussion prompts and class activities. Some activities we’ve run in class include: executing Turing Machine algorithms, auditory and visual perception demos, and a live prisoner’s dilemma game (with extra credit on the line!).
LANGUAGE AND COGNITION
Instructor: Spring 2023
Language and Cognition is an upper division cross-listed course under Cognitive Science and Linguistics.
In Language and Cognition, students investigate the connection between linguistic structure and other domains of cognition, including vision, audition, smell, spatial navigation, and number. We critically evaluate the historical debates between generative linguistics, cognitive linguistics, functionalism, and linguistic relativity.
Every student is assigned to a language family and chooses a grammar of a language in that family. Over the course of the semester, they scour their grammar for features of their language that bear on the topic at hand – facts about word order, morphology, syllable structure and phonotactics, deixis, grammatical number and numerals, and color terms.
ADVANCED TOPICS II: Speech Perception
Instructor: Fall 2023
This is an advanced, discussion-based seminar course on the challenges and dimensions of the speech perception process. The course ranges from tonotopic and periodotopic mapping of speech sounds on the auditory cortex, to the content of speech sound representations in the mind, to top-down effects of native language phonology and multimodal integration. We also discuss extra-linguistic challenges in the speech perception process, including speaker normalization and auditory scene analysis.
Neural Structure of Language
Instructor: Fall 2020-Fall 2023
Neural Structure of Language is a lower-level version of my advanced topic seminar course. In this course, we track the neural bases of sentence processing from the lexicon and lexical access to syntactic structure-building operations. This is a much larger course than the seminar, with 50 seats, and is organized around lecture and group discussion.
Undergraduate seminar in cognitive science
Instructor: Spring 2022, Spring 2023
The undergraduate seminar in cognitive science is a capstone course for the cognitive science major at Rutgers. In this course, students will hear a new guest lecture every week from a researcher in some area of cognitive science to become acquainted with their research. Students also lead discussions of published research articles in cognitive science, chosen by the guest lecturers.
I’ve organized the course into 4 modules: Language, Artificial Intelligence, Learning, and Decision-Making, with each module featuring talks from linguists, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists so we can see how a common theme of understanding the mind and its function permeates all of these fields.
Advanced Topics II – Neural Structure of Language
Instructor: Spring 2020
This was an advanced seminar on neurolinguistics with an emphasis on neurosyntax. This was a small course, featuring in-depth discussion of cutting-edge research in neurolinguistics, including work on neural oscillations, ECoG, and modeling brain activity using both discrete hierarchical models familiar to linguists as well as probabilistic models used in computer science.
Psycholinguistics
Instructor: Spring 2017, Fall 2018
Psycholinguistics was my favorite course I taught at UD! The course was cross-listed for undergraduates and masters students, and the course concluded with students writing a proposal for a psycholinguistics experiment. The brilliance and creativity of the ideas they came up with blew me away! Several students from this class used their final papers as writing samples to apply for graduate school. I’m very proud of all of them!
Introduction to Cognitive Science
Instructor: Fall 2016, Spring 2019
I taught an introductory cognitive science course at UD, with a similar format to the course I now teach at Rutgers. This was a large lecture hall class, with over a hundred students. This course was designed to fulfill a requirement for the speech pathology track of the cognitive science major at UD, so a majority of our students were future speech pathologists with a strong interest in linguistics and developmental psychology. This course was intended to expose them to other areas of cognitive science, including philosophy, vision science, and computer science.
Introduction to Linguistics
Instructor: Winter 2017, Winter 2018, Winter 2019
Introduction to Linguistics is an absolute classic – it gets right back to my roots! In intro to linguistics, we cover several branches of linguistics from phonetics to phonology to morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, acquisition, sociolinguistics, and time permitting, even a little psycho/neurolinguistics. Some of my intro students have gone on to study linguistics in graduate school, which is just the best!