I seek to share my enthusiasm with my students to encourage them to become actively engaged in the classroom and beyond. No matter what course I teach, I believe it is crucial to foster a strong classroom community, and I invest significant resources throughout each course to create a sense of belonging and ownership amongst my students. I also work diligently on reducing potential barriers between students and instructor to ensure that students feel comfortable and can achieve their potential. Each meeting involves feedback opportunities for content, assignments, and approaches to learning, including instant polling, that also feed into improving each course year to year. All my courses make use of a multitude of media and outside speakers when appropriate to present content, they are highly interactive, and heavily involve students in the learning and evaluation process, as well as the development of the course during the semester. Feedback from my students and lasting relationships with them indicate that my approach is essential in building strong connections among the students as well as with me.

My diverse research interests and training make me well-suited to teach on diverse issues, which is reflected in the 5 different courses I have prepared at Penn State. I have repeatedly taught the core course PPOL 801 “The Policy Process.” The course combines both real-world and scholarly content with a focus on the stages and institutions as well as major theories of the policy process. Students build on this foundation by developing a group-based policymaking process research report and present it to the course. PPOL 810 “Policy and Program Evaluation” provides students an overview of scientifically based means of assessing whether programs and policies are effective after they have been implemented, as well as measurement issues and research designs. Students apply this knowledge by developing their own evaluation proposals and by assessing professional evaluations. I have also prepared an undergraduate (PUBL 482) and graduate level (PPOL 807) course on health policy and politics that enables students to understand how health policy is made and what important health policy issues the country confronts. I also developed the special topics course PPOL 597 “Politics and the Pandemic,” featured in Penn State News, which used data and analysis to demonstrate the significance policy and politics play during the pandemic, and to stress the systemic inequities and partisan politics that challenge our confrontation of a national health emergency. Finally, I also taught a course, PLSC 490 “Policy Making and Evaluation,” focused on the analysis of public policy, emphasizing policy evaluation and the factors that determine policy success and failure in our sister department, Political Science. At the core of the course is the students’ group-based legislative policymaking report which they also present to the course.

While I am committed to academic excellence, I also have a deep commitment to furthering equity, diversity, and inclusion. This commitment has been shaped by own professional experiences at a non-profit that provides legal and healthcare services to those in need, and another non-profit seeking to improve healthcare access for needy populations. I also try to continuously improve my pedagogy by taking advantage of workshops and trainings. Here at Penn State, I have participated in a year-long series of teaching workshops by the Schreyer Institute, and I have taken almost a dozen courses from World Campus. These experiences build upon my three-year RWJF fellowship which is focused on inclusive and diverse change leadership, as well as the training received as part of the CVHPI Health Policy Leadership Program.