Teaching

Philosophy

I owe a large debt to the wonderful professors I had as an undergraduate at La Salle University, without whom I would not have made it to graduate school. I strive to pay that forward through teaching and mentorship. I make myself as accessible as possible to my students, meeting and assisting them one-on-one whenever necessary. I love economics, and am committed to creating a safe and inclusive atmosphere where students from all different backgrounds can explore the discipline (and hopefully fall in love with it themselves!). An extended teaching statement can be found here.

Solo instruction

In Spring 2026 I designed and taught a course on the economics of higher education, entitled “Is a College Degree Still Worth It?”

The course was designed for a general audience and included 11 students studying public health, Africana Studies, and other fields. We surveyed the higher education landscape, both in the US and internationally. Using The Race between Education and Technology (Goldin & Katz, 2008), as well as journal and popular news articles, we built up the elements of a model of education choice in plain language. We put the pieces together to better understand how economists understand decision-making under uncertainty in the context of higher education.

I received an overall rating of 4.67 (out of 5), comparing favorably to the school-wide mean (median) of 4.24 (4.0).

As teaching assistant

I have served as a TA for several courses while a graduate student at JHU. In Fall 2023, I was a TA for Elements of Microeconomics for Professor Muhammad Husain; the materials I prepared for my section can be found here. In Fall 2024 I was a TA for Professor Yujung Hwang’s upper-level course on “Race, Gender, and Culture”, where I learned a tremendous amount about how to foster active discussion amongst a small group of students, often on hot-button issues such as gender discrimination or cultural assimilation in immigrant communities.

My favorite part of teaching is helping students find intuition in technical material and connect economics to their everyday lives, something our discipline often struggles to do. For this reason, I am particularly fond of serving as a TA for undergraduate Econometrics, which I have done in Spring 2024 (with Dr. Jonathan Wright; supplementary materials are here), Spring 2025 (with Dr. Elena Krasnokutskaya), Fall 2025 (with Dr. Lixiong Li), and Spring 2026 (with Dr. Domenico Giannone).

I have received positive evaluations as a TA, which have resulted in winning the department undergraduate teaching award for the 2023-24, 2024-25, and 2025-26 academic years. My average scores (with averages for the department and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences (KSAS) for comparison where available) have been:

Class	Semester	Me	Dept.	KSAS
Elements of Microeconomics	Fall 2023	4.32	3.85	4.2
Econometrics	Spring 2024	4.75	3.98	4.24
Race, Gender, and Culture	Fall 2024	4.44	3.79	4.25
Econometrics	Spring 2025	4.6	4.05	4.26
Econometrics	Fall 2025	4.67	3.91	4.25
Econometrics	Spring 2026	4.48	-	4.28

I am currently a TA for Labor Economics with Professor Muhammad Husain.

Mentorship

In Fall 2024 I participated in a JHU program called “Teaching K-Ph.D.”, where I gave a guest lesson to an AP Economics class at Baltimore Polytechnic High School. The lecture was a gentle introduction to Labor Economics (with a dash of econometrics), structured around the work of Claudia Goldin (who had just won the Nobel prize). Those materials (slides and a Jupyter Notebook) can be found here.

My dissertation involves survey work at a Maryland community college. As part of this partnership, I have mentored several students from the community college as they pursue independent research using some data from my survey. In addition, I served as graduate student advisor for the undergraduate honors thesis of a JHU student.