Brief Biographical Sketch:

I grew up in Los Angeles. In high school, I was interested in math and science, and in my senior year took A.P. Environmental Science from a fantastic teacher. He convinced me that, no matter what I did with my life, I was destined to be a teacher in some way. Much of my teaching philosophy is inspired by his work.

I received my Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Princeton University. In addition to math, I took many courses in physics, philosophy, environmental engineering, and education. Many of these coincided; my term papers in education classes were on gender bias in high school and early college mathematics, and my favorite philosophy course was on the philosophy of science. I also spent a summer teaching Calculus sections for the Freshman Scholars Institute, a program designed to get incoming freshmen up-to-speed on the math necessary for college science and engineering.

With my math and physics background, I came to MIT as a doctoral student in climate physics. My main focuses are on the role of turbulence in the large-scale ocean circulation (especially in the Southern Ocean) and the role of air-sea interaction in climate stability.

The earth sciences are a wonderful subject. The problems in these fields combine biology, chemistry, physics and math in a way that no other field does. Best of all, this combination is used to study things that happen all around us, in everyday life; things that you can go out and touch; systems that you can observe in your daily life but take a lifetime to understand.

Past Classes