Teaching and Mentorship

My teaching and mentorship experiences are wide-ranging and serve well to prepare me for the teaching responsibilities I will have as an assistant professor. Currently, I am the Instructor of Record for POL 196E: Research Design and Methods for Public Policy at the UC Center Sacramento (UCCS), which I am teaching for all three quarters of the 2025-26 year.  This course emphasizes the mechanics of sound research design and culminates in students conducting original, empirical research projects related to some aspect of California policy.  Many of my students have no prior research experience; I support students throughout all aspects of the research process, from identifying and refining a research question, hypothesis, and research design to collecting, analyzing, and presenting the empirical data that inform their findings. During the Fall 2025 term, I oversaw 43 individual projects related to a wide range of timely issues in California politics, including artificial intelligence, immigration, wildfire risk mitigation, election reforms. 

 From 2023-2025, I served as a Teaching Assistant (TA) for both the undergraduate public policy and quantitative methods courses at UCCS, which gave me additional experience teaching and mentoring undergraduate students in a research-oriented setting. Since 2023, I have taught and mentored over 250 undergraduates undertaking original research projects, of whom approximately 44% are first-generation college students. 

As an ABD Ph.D. Candidate, I’ve also prioritized mentoring early-stage Ph.D. students as they hone their methodological skills and begin to develop their research agendas. In addition to informal mentorship activities in this area, I have also TAed the Causal Inference I course at the ICPSR Summer Program, where I gained additional experience communicating high-level statistical concepts to graduate students across the social sciences.

This teaching and mentorship experience makes me well equipped to teach a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels as an Assistant Professor. I am prepared to teach substantive classes related to general topics in American politics and policy, including state and local politics, public opinion, political behavior and polarization, political parties, and elections, campaigns, and voting behavior. Methodologically, I am well equipped to teach graduate seminars on causal inference, introduction to regression analysis, generalized linear regression/maximum likelihood estimation, and experimental design, as well as undergraduate probability, statistics, and introduction to research methods courses. Furthermore, my experience mentoring advanced undergraduates conducting original research makes me well equipped to teach capstone or thesis seminar courses.