Teaching
My Teaching Philosophy
I embrace teaching as an opportunity to encourage students to do their best.
In particular, I enjoy teaching interdisciplinary courses, like the recent course "Physics of Migraine" in the master program of physics. This course was the first in Berlin that closed the gender gap in theoretical physics, an area where female students are strongly underrepresented. I gained first valuable experience on teaching interdisciplinary subjects as an instructor during three semesters of a course ”Neuromodeling and Neural Networks”. The majority of my students came from biology and medicine. For most of them, this was the first theoretical course they took. With that in mind, I had three main objectives for their learning experiences:
- to provide fundamental knowledge in mathematical and computational modeling of biological systems,
- to facilitate the appreciation for this area, and
- to enhance their skills to a level to allow them to further their education in their target discipline.
But my primary goal is to encourage them to work along paths beyond what they thought they could achieve.
I do not believe that students in life sciences have a lack of appreciation of mathematical and computational modeling, but they may bring with them preconceived opinions about their ability to explore it and contribute. These preconceived opinions consist of false assumptions that manifest into a lack of understanding for the science of mathematics and computer science. Before I can challenge them to think differently, I must first help my students see the relevance of theoretical concepts in their desired career path. Therefore, I highly value an interplay between research and teaching. I am very much a person who learns by doing, but only when I actually see the relevance for my own work. And I believe that most of my students are similar in this respect.
What I teach. When students first come to my interdisciplinary classes they often ask whether they will learn how to solve differential equations or which programming language they will learn. Then I tell them that my course is not about solving equations or programming. It is about translating problems in life sciences into mathematical equations that can be solved and into algorithms and data structures that can be programmed. Although I bring the course to life by providing always simple examples of solving equations and implementing programs, it is not about this. Of course, hand-on experience is provided. I assigned weekly problem sets and offered a two-week practical course in small groups.
How I teach. In my class, I do not overuse technical equipment. I write anything important on the chalkboard and I pay particular attention to the layout of the material on the board, as I have found that such a simple thing as how formulas are developed and arranged on a board has considerably affect on the ability to pick something up. That way, I can set a very natural pace of learning. It took a lot of practice not to unduly slow down the pace of the lecture and limit how much content can be covered. From time to time I take my laptop and a beamer to my class to give a review of the previous class or on issues that I know the students have not seen for awhile. Also, I present graphics and animations with the beamer if I think this can more efficientlytransport knowledge. Moreover, I provide electronic notes to my students but advice them to complement them by their own notes during the lecture and afterwards. I can see many of my students leaving my classes more awake than when they came in. I believe that this is not only because I embrace teaching as an opportunity to inspire and empower, but also because my students not only see the teacher in me. They also see the researcher who is simply passionate about what he is doing.