Education & Public Outreach

Outreach at Berkeley

I've had the privilege to participate in many education and public outreach (EPO) activities in my career, and I'm usually on the lookout for new opportunities. Please let me know if you're looking for a speaker, mentor, or contributor for a project!

Note that most of the activities on this page were from my time in California. For more information about my teaching at F&M, see my faculty profile page there.

Past Student Research and Mentoring

  • UC Berkeley undergraduate Elizabeth Trenholm (senior) is measuring Lyman-alpha halos around dwarf galaxies (2016)
  • UC Berkeley undergraduate Jose Zamora Zeledon (rising sophomore) ran radiative-transfer simulations of ionizing photon escape from realistic and toy galaxy models (Summer 2016)
  • Berkeley High School student Elijah Wilensky conducted an internship stacking Keck images of faint galaxies (Summer 2016)
  • Drew High School student Duncan Rocha conducted an internship correlating physical properties of galaxies with their Lyman-alpha emission (May 2016)
  • University of Edinburgh undergraduate Anna de Graaff (junior) measured the sizes and morphologies of galaxies in HST imaging (2015-16)
  • UC Berkeley undergraduate Shanon Oden (junior/senior) developed a method to automatically detect and characterize emission lines in LRIS spectra (2014-16)
  • I am working with the new UC Berkeley Undergraduate Astronomy Society (UAS) to organize events for undergraduate students and senior department members, including our inaugural undergraduate research symposium (2016)

Past Undergraduate Teaching

  • Teaching Intro to Astronomy at UC Berkeley (Instructor of Record, Summer 2015)
  • Teaching guest lectures for Intro to Cosmology at UC Berkeley (Spring/Fall 2015)
  • Teaching Intro to Astronomy discussion sessions at Caltech (2010)
  • Helping produce a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Galaxies and Cosmology with 28,000 enrolled students (2013)

Public Lectures and Outreach

  • Giving a public lecture on galaxy formation and helping with organization and advertising for UC Berkeley's new Astro Night lecture and star-gazing event series (2016)
  • Giving a public lecture at CCSF on supermassive black holes (2016)
  • Co-leading UC Berkeley Astronomy's Ask an Astronomer program (2014-2016)
  • Giving a public lecture on galaxy formation for Science@Cal (2014, recording available)
  • Speaking about astronomy at the Berkeley High School Career Day
  • Speaking about astronomy at the Los Altos High School STEM Week
  • Public astronomy events at UC Berkeley and Caltech
  • Speaking about MOOCs at education seminars and in PR videos for Caltech
  • Mentoring and judging middle-school science fair contestants in the Pasadena Unified School District
  • Speaking in 5th-grade and 8th-grade classrooms about astronomy and science at Pasadena and LA schools
  • Co-leading the Caltech Astronomy Outreach team for 4 years, including the organization of public events, classroom events, and social media outreach