Teaching

While at Penn State I have acted as a teaching assistant for a few regular semester courses, including Geology of the National Parks, Environmental Geology, Geomorphology and History of the Earth. Check out the Quaternary Geology lecture slides I made for GEOSC 310, which includes some PA periglacial history!

The highlight of my teaching experience has been the summer field course that takes Penn State Geoscience majors to four western states to map Laramide structures, Quaternary moraines, metamorphic contacts and volcanic flows. Summers 2016-2018 I assisted 35-50 students for six weeks of geology exercises, which involved field observations as well as digital mapmaking. Field camp TAs bear additional logistical responsibilities which has taught me project (read: stress) management skills in addition to teaching techniques.

Association for Women in Geoscience

 

I served as a co-president for AWG from 2017-2019, during which time graduate students did amazing work to improve department culture and mentorship. Read about our successes in our 2019 AGU abstract and my extended writeup in national AWG’s GAEA newsletter.

Mentoring

In 2017 and 2018 Penn State WISER engineering student Rose Martin and I worked on both mapping periglacial landforms from PA lidar and processing field and digital data from waterfall and bedrock-fracture measurements at the Finger Lakes. Rose is interested in sustainable energy infrastructure and was happy to use the coding skills she learned in our lab for her summer internship to, among other things, program circuit boards to report data to a central cloud storage system! Very cool!

During the summer 2015 I mentored Sarah Granke (Pomona College) in field mapping, point counts and soil samples in Garner Run at the SSHCZO. Find our abstract from GSA 2015 here! During the summer 2016 I mentored Connor Martin (University of Pittsburgh) and Perri Silverhart (Middlebury College) in field mapping, soil sampling, infiltrometer testing and designing and executing sprinkler experiments in Garner Run. GSA 2016: my abstract (with Connor) can be found here, and Perri’s abstract is here. Perri and Connor also presented their work at the CUAHSI conference – check them out (Perri ,Connor)!

Outreach

I love when I get the chance to explain geology and landscape history to the public, especially K-12 students! A favorite of mine is giving the geology lecture to Science Education students at Penn State (we do a rock quiz!).

I am assisted the Shavers Creek Environmental Center design new exhibits for their newly-renovated classrooms. Here is the poster I made that is currently hanging in their classroom (Shavers Creek poster).