Participation in courses and training
Stanford Teaching Certificate: During my post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford between 2018 and 2020, I completed over 70 hours of pedagogical training, and compiled an annotated and reviewed teaching portfolio. Through this valuable experience, I fulfilled the training requirements for the Stanford Teaching Certificate, which is offered through the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs to provide teaching preparation to postdoctoral scholars. The prestigious certificate also has a mandatory practical component, and by teaching TPS200: Fluid mechanics at the Department of building and environmental technology (IBM) at NMBU, I have fulfilled this requirement, and was awarded the teaching certificate.
As part of my teaching training, I completed the following courses:
- Science and Engineering Course Design (ENG312) – 10 weeks
- Scientific Teaching Institute – 3 days
- Teaching Workshop designed to enhance my versatility as a teacher – 2 days
Engineering Course Design (VPTL 312) is aimed at post docs interested in an academic career and who anticipate designing science or engineering courses at the undergraduate or graduate level. Goal is to apply research on science and engineering learning to the design of effective course materials. Topics include syllabus design, course content and format decisions, assessment planning and grading, and strategies for teaching improvement. During this course, I developed a teaching portfolio for the mock class “Kitchen Flows”, which uses simple kitchen experiments to teach complex fluid mechanical principles (see “Educational Contributions” below). Instructor: Prof. Sheri Sheppard
Scientific Teaching charges instructors to apply their analytical skills to gain insights into effective approaches for engaging students in learning, designing assessments that gauge student conceptions, and promoting equity and access to science learning for all students. At this workshop, we learned effective strategies for active learning, which is known to promote engagement, intuition and deep learning among students. As prospective faculty member at the department, I plan to implement active learning in my classes.
Teaching workshop: This two-day teaching improvement workshop for postdoctoral scholars in the biomedical or life sciences is designed to enhance participants’ versatility as teachers, enable them to use a 7-component educational framework to analyze teaching, and provide a forum for collegial exchange about teaching.
Journal Club: In addition, I frequently attended both the Postdoc Pedagogy Journal Club readings and the Academic Chats at Stanford, both of which count towards the Teaching Certificate. At these events, I explored various topics around teaching methods and pedagogical theory in concert with other postdocs as well as expand my network of postdocs interested in teaching.
Teaching and supervision experience
Teaching and mentoring at the University of Oslo (UiO): Between 2014 and 2015, I was a teaching assistant at UiO, Dept. Mathematics in course “Experimental Techniques in Fluid Mechanics” for MSc and PhD students. The topic for these lectures was “Advanced optical measurement techniques for microfluidic flows”, where the students specifically learned to implement velocimetry techniques such as micro Particle Image Velocimetry for characterizing flow velocity fields. In addition, I designed lab assignments and built an experimental setup suitable for learning, and I advised students. Instructor: Prof. Atle Jensen.
Mentoring at Stanford: I continued to be interested in mentoring in the Fuller lab at Dept. Chem. Eng., Stanford. Here, I mentored one PhD student (daily) for four weeks, two Master’s students (daily) for ten weeks, two Bachelor students weekly for 10 months and one high school intern bi-weekly for 6 months. These students worked on various projects under my supervision, including gravitational instabilities in viscous and skin-forming polymer solutions and drainage and de-wetting dynamics of artificial tear-films solutions. Their valuable contribution to the experiments has given them co-authorship to one paper that is already published, and one paper that was recently submitted.
These students came from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, and through these mentorships, I have learned a lot about different cultures, and I have learned about some of the challenges faced by young scientists coming from unprivileged families. These experiences are invaluable in establishing a diverse research group built on team-spirit and mutual respect.
I also have experience from mentoring students from other fields and I was picked to lead a team of five graduate students in Bioengineering as part of a microfluidics manufacturing and laboratory class taught by Prof. Polly Fordyce (BIOE 301D: HANDS-ON MICROFLUIDICS LABORATORY). In only ten weeks, the “Breadboard-team" was able to create a hydrodynamic post that showed promising separation characteristics and to control its diameter by adjusting the flow rates (see fordycelab.com/teaching).
Mentoring training at Stanford: As a post-doctoral fellow, I completed 8 hours of mentoring training through the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.
Teaching experience from industry: In addition to my academic mentoring and teaching experience, I gained valuable teaching skills through teaching fluid flow simulations software to other engineers while working as a technical consultant for two years.
Mentoring and teaching at NMBU
Supervising M.Sc. students at NMBU:
Teaching fluid mechanics at NMBU: In addition to supervising, I lectured TPS200: Fluid mechanics at NMBU. Duties: preparing and teaching two double lectures each week, making weekly home assignments, managing a fluid mechanics lab used to conceptualize theoretical concepts, providing instruction during weekly lab assignments and home assignments, and making and grading the final exam.
To foster student engagement and intuition, I adopted an active learning strategy (for this purpose, I obtained a Kahoot! account for teachers in higher education), I used examples from my engineering background and from my own research, I incorporated the e-learning tool Multimedia Fluid Mechanics, as well as relatable “kitchen experiments” at home and in class, as described in more detail below.
Educational contributions – Kitchen Flows
How it started: In the Stanford teaching course “Science and Engineering Course Design”, we were asked to develop a syllabus for a class we would like to teach as faculty members in the future. Since fluid dynamics lies at the core of my scientific interest, I decided to engineer my own class in fluids, but it was not immediately obvious to me what kind of fluid class I wanted to develop. Initially, I was tempted to develop a course in experimental microfluidics, where the students build and design their own geometries which are then tested in the laboratory. Such a class would be modeled after the Hands-on Microfluidics Laboratory, but with a stronger focus on the transport processes at the microscale. However, laboratory classes are extremely labor intensive and are best managed in small classes, typically at the graduate level. And since device design is a major component of any class in microfluidics, it can be challenging to allow sufficient time to learn for the theory underpinning the transport of mass, momentum, and energy.
Turning the kitchen into a classroom: With these realizations, I decided to instead construct a mock class aimed at teaching fluid mechanics to large groups of students across the disciplines. But instead of doing tedious lab work, the students perform simple experiments in their own kitchen! This approach is not only suited during a pandemic outbreak; it also helps to build intuition and to relate to the theoretical framework presented in textbooks. The kitchen is a lab full of interesting flow phenomena: The hydraulic jump caused by a tap water jet that impinges the kitchen sink, the agglomeration of bubbles on the rim of the coffee cup and the dynamics of bubbles in fizzy drinks are all fascinating examples of kitchen flows we encounter every day. In this new course, Master’s and Ph.D. level students would learn powerful analytical techniques that they can use to describe the fascinating dynamics of these flows. In addition, the students learn to analyze the stability of these flows, enabling them to explain the breakup of the continuous tap water jet into droplets, the formation of the coffee stain pattern and how the evaporation of alcohol can create fascinating flow fields in a cocktail.
Educational paper on kitchen flows: During my post-doctoral fellowships in the US, I was not given the opportunity to establish a class in kitchen flows and culinary fluid mechanics. However, with restricted lab access due to the covid-19 pandemic, I decided to develop a pedagogical review paper describing the wealth of flow phenomena in our own kitchen. I reached out to my peers, and together with three young physics professors in the US and in Europe, we wrote a commissioned review entitled "Culinary fluid mechanics and other currents in food science” (Reviews of Modern Physics (2021)). As described in our review paper, the kitchen is also a gateway to learn about other scientific disciplines such as molecular gastronomy, soft matter, statistical physics, as well as thermodynamics (boiling, phase change), heat transfer, electromagnetism (induction plate top), chemistry (e.g., the classical Meynard-reaction when frying eggs) and food science. We are not aware of any extensive reviews on either of these topics.