My teaching connects physical intuition with real observations and hands-on work. Skills should develop with a clear purpose and transfer beyond the classroom. In every course, students shape a project of their own. Many link it to their research, while others use it to try new methods and media. Students arrive with very different preparation, and I want each of them to find a way in. I support every student toward their own goals, not toward a single model of success.
Flagship Courses
ASTR 75
High-Energy Astrophysics
Dartmouth College, newly designed (Spring 2025)
A theory course built around discussion. We develop core concepts and derivations together on the board, connect them to real observations, and discuss the current research literature in class. Students compute, for example, the dispersion measure of the Lorimer burst and find that it comes from far outside our Galaxy. In a podcast series, I interviewed astrophysicists such as Sophia Sanchez-Maes and Kenzie Nimmo, and students reflected on and discussed the interviews. Each student also presents a piece of modern research that surprises them, in a format of their choice.
Enduring understandings
- Natural laboratories: Extreme astrophysical environments reveal fundamental physics far beyond the conditions on Earth.
- Many approaches: Complex systems require theory, simulation, and observation working together.
- Estimation: Hard problems become manageable through approximation and order-of-magnitude reasoning.
- Connected expertise: Deep expertise builds on several disciplines and on working within a professional network.
PHYS 115
Magnetohydrodynamics
Dartmouth College, graduate course, newly designed (Spring 2026)
A theory course that treats MHD as a reduced fluid model of plasma, from the structure of its equations to stability theory and modern computational methods. Each student presents a research paper in a short recorded talk for a broad scientific audience. An optional teaching track lets students design and lead a 50-minute lecture segment, with a planning meeting beforehand and a written reflection afterwards. Many students found that teaching the material pushed them past the limits of their own understanding. Our paper club Donuts and Dynamos opened the discussion to plasma physics students beyond the class.
“I have never seen more effort and time invested by a professor to ensure students were learning.”
Student evaluation
Enduring understandings
- Reduced fluid model: The power and the limits of MHD follow from the assumptions that lead from kinetic to fluid descriptions.
- Mathematical structure: Conservation laws, hyperbolicity, and variational principles constrain waves, stability, and nonlinear evolution.
- Topological constraints: Flux freezing and helicity restrict plasma evolution. When reconnection breaks them, behavior can change abruptly.
- Stability and methods: Instabilities grow from free energy in gradients, currents, flows, and geometry. Analytical and numerical tools must respect this structure to capture them faithfully.
PHYS 118
Computational Plasma Dynamics
Dartmouth College, graduate course, newly designed (Winter 2026)
A hands-on course in modern plasma modeling. Students run kinetic, fluid, and hybrid simulations on CPUs and GPUs with codes such as Entity, Gkeyll, and gPLUTO. Along the way, they learn high-performance computing, version control, and the responsible use of generative AI. Each student completes a project on a phenomenon or method that interests or surprises them, and presents it at an open poster session.
Enduring understandings
- Model choice: No single model captures all plasma dynamics. Insight comes from linking kinetic, fluid, and hybrid descriptions.
- Numerics shape physics: Stability, resolution, and conservation decide what a simulation can capture.
- Credible pipelines: Reliable results depend on the full pipeline, from code architecture and parallelization to validation and reproducibility.
- From data to insight: Simulation output becomes science only when it is analyzed, visualized, and tied back to physical principles.
PHYS 3
General Physics I
Dartmouth College, about 120 students (Fall 2025) and 59 students (Summer 2026)
A calculus-based introduction to mechanics and thermodynamics for a large and diverse audience. Lectures are full of live demonstrations and frequent polls. Students discuss each poll with their neighbors before we resolve it together. In four labs, they test physical laws with their own experiments. For extra practice, I built an AI-assisted exercise generator that helps students create and check their own practice problems.
“[The course taught physics] conceptually rather than as a collection of formulas.”
Student evaluation
Enduring understandings
- Physical laws: A few fundamental laws describe motion, energy, and heat throughout the Universe.
- Mathematics: Calculus and order-of-magnitude estimation are tools for reasoning about the physical world.
- Communication: Physical ideas become useful when they are explained clearly and concisely.
- Scientific reasoning: Physics advances through the interplay of models, experiments, and evidence.
Beyond the Classroom
Teaching continues outside the lecture hall.
- Student radio telescope club (Winter 2027, planned): students build a small radio telescope for less than $300, then help revive the department’s own radio dish.
- Interactive insights: web apps for building intuition in astrophysics.
- Animations: more than 30 animations of plasma processes on YouTube.
- Knowledge base: a growing wiki that helps students start with computational plasma physics from day one.
- Guest teaching: a three-hour lecture on pulsar magnetospheres at the Caltech Relativistic Astrophysics Summer School, guest lectures at Columbia University, and master’s teaching at the Observatoire de Paris and Université PSL.
- Earlier: math literacy classes in New Jersey youth facilities through the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative, and teaching assistant positions in theoretical physics at Leibniz Universität Hannover.
