Research

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

My current research interests are in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning:

"The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) movement encourages faculty to view teaching “problems” as invitations to conduct scholarly investigations. In this growing field of inquiry faculty bring their disciplinary knowledge and teaching experience to bear on questions of teaching and learning. They systematically gather evidence to develop and support their conclusions."

I am particularly concerned with incorporating evidence-based practices in my classroom relating to

I have experience implementing project-based instruction, flipped classroom formats, group work utilizing vertical non-permanent surfaces, oral assessments, and labor-based grading schemes. 

Ph.D. Research

My research interests during graduate school were in algebraic groups and representation theory in positive characteristic. I was specifically interested in the classification of normal orbit closures in simple algebraic groups.

In my doctoral dissertation, I generalized to positive, good characteristic the first main results of Kraft-Procesi on the normality of closures of conjugacy classes in the symplectic and orthogonal groups. I plan to continue this work and hope to generalize the remainder of their analysis of the specific singularities occurring in non-normal orbit closures and give a precise classification of the normal orbit closures. Ideally, I would like to expand that generalization to the “very even” cases examined by Sommers in D_2l and possibly to some of the exceptional groups which have yet to be analyzed in positive characteristic.

My dissertation has been published by ProQuest/UMI. The abstract can be viewed here. If you are unable to access a full version through your institution and would like a pdf, please contact me directly.

Papers:

Dimensions of Orthosymplectic Nilpotent Orbits, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, Volume 220, Issue 3, March 2016, Pages 892-925.