Teaching and Mentoring

Nurturing of knowledge and its diffusion into society is one of the key purposes of academia. In addition to my personal scientific endeavors, I also have the pleasure to share my knowledge with students, both as a teacher and as a mentor. I feel honored to have made contributions to the careers of many students.

I have been a guest/substitute lecturer for Solid State Physics, Classical Mechanics, and Electricity and Magnetism (University of California, Berkeley).

I have been a teaching assistant for Organic Chemistry, Solids and Surfaces, Quantum Chemistry, Ester Project, Synthesis and Analysis (Utrecht University), Physics for Biology Students (University of Groningen).

I have mentored over 20 students.

I happen to have a knack for computer-aided design, 3D printing, laser cutting and engraving, and I'm quite nifty with Inkscape and FreeCAD. In some of my projects, I combine laser engraving and 3D printing, where the larger, panel-like features are make from wood while the connectors are custom-printed out of PLA or PETG. I found that 3D creativity can tie very well together with education, as I have made use of engraving and 3D printing to make visual aides for the class room. On the left, you can see a buckminsterfullerene ("bucky ball") of carbon atoms, a rare earth metal complex I studied in the STM on a gold surface, a Sierpinski tetrahedron, a nitrogen-doped graphene nanoribbons and a substitutionally doped transition metal dichalcogenide. Below is a honeycomb Moire supercell made from engraved wood.

I am currently engaged in a project to build my own 3D-printed epifluorescence microscope. The epifluorescence microscope illuminates an area of a sample with ultraviolet light, tightly focused from an expanded collimated laser beam, then filters out the optical fluorescent light using a dichroic mirror and uses that to generate an image. This is analogous to the photo-STM setup we use at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where the focus region is a tip-sample junction.