Teaching

I teach across a wide range of disciplines, including public health, public policy, sociology, and demography. I seek to make it possible for students to recognize social processes and how they contribute to population-level outcomes that we care about. There is an important lesson to be learned about populations in every class--understanding inequalities in health and healthcare, methodological approaches, and social processes--and I expect that students leave class with a broader perspective on the social and demographic world. Students may enter the class thinking on an individual or behavioral level, but they leave thinking about social structures, context, and group-level dynamics. I also think it's important to add some 'trivia' into any class, not for the information value itself, but to recognize that each of us knows something unusual!

At the University of Maryland, College Park, I taught courses on the US Healthcare System, Health Equity, and Advanced Research Methods.

At Penn State, I teach the Statistics for Public Policy I and II sequence for Masters of Public Policy Students and am currently teaching a doctoral course on Mortality in the Sociology/Demography PhD program.