Welcome!

Teaching

I’m a Teaching Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I specialize in creating curricular materials that are 1) scaleable to large classes, 2) conceptually-driven toward core statistical ideas, and 3) embedded in authentic examples to promote statistical inquiry and meaningful application.

Much of my time at Illinois has been invested in redesigning our Introduction to Biostatistics course–an accelerated introductory course with applications relevant for students pursuing careers in the medical field. My course notes and lab assignments are shared under my Teaching Materials page and may be used and adapted freely!

Research

As a statistics education researcher, I primarily conduct qualitative research. Most recently, I’ve been working with Nicola Justice, Florian Berens, and Chris Kinson to identify students’ perspectives of statistics and exploring how students’ experiences may shape those perspectives over time.

I also conduct research on various areas of student thinking in statistics that moves beyond deficit framings and instead identifies the conceptual resources students express. One area of interest for me in teaching Biostatistics has been identifying student resources and tensions around issues of causality and generalizability in relation to statistical design. I have also conducted similar work studying students’ resources about sampling distributions for the mean.

TA Training and Professional Development

A significant part of my service responsibilities is working with graduate teaching assistants. With the help of my colleague Julie Deeke, our department now has a dedicated training for our first-year PhD students that focuses on building cohort unity, technology on-boarding, and pedagogical discussions in relation to fundamental statistical topics.

As part of my service work, I have also helped create a TA Training committee. This committee is dedicated to building a healthy community in our department that values the work our TAs do, facilitates TA relationships with supervisors, and considers how our TAs can have valuable experiences in leadership and technology innovation that serve them past their times here. We have also recently created a PhD Mentors program, in which our volunteer mentors plan outings with the new PhD students.