Teaching and Mentoring

A teacher holds a pivotal role in shaping the classroom environment and teaching approach to foster students' acquisition of the essential skill sets needed for the future. While course content taught at universities is readily available in the digital realm, universities distinguish themselves by cultivating a learning environment geared towards nurturing the metacognitive skills necessary for tackling intricate real-world challenges.

I believe in an active classroom with clear and quantifiable objectives to promote hands-on experiences and peer-to-peer learning.

Teaching experience

Lead instructor for ME 200 at UIUC, Spring 2022

Designed and taught ME 200 Thermodynamics curriculum to over 109 undergrad students with diverse educational and demographical backgrounds at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The course curriculum is designed to facilitate the students with the materials required to learn the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and the limitations of energy conversion and generation devices. The principles are applied in thermodynamic analyses directed towards understanding the performances of engineering systems. Methods and problems cover socially responsible economic generation and utilization of energy in central power generation plants, solar systems, refrigeration devices, and automobile, jet and gas-turbine engines. Students worked in neighborhoods to promote individual accountability with incorporated peer-to-peer learning. 

Co-instructor of Engineering Research and Design, Minority Engineering Program (MEP) summer school

Designed and taught engineering research and design concepts to 11th and 12th-grade kids from underrepresented communities. A 6-week program is designed to include career advise for their college applications, teaching the thermodynamic laws and fundamentals of wind energy with a hands-on project to create a wind turbine and evaluate its power production at various wind speeds. This summer program was organized virtually during COVID-19 pandemic.

Mentoring

Climate change  - CO2 sequestration integration with wind energy

Mentored a master's student on her thesis to integrate renewable energy, wind turbines with Direct Air Capture (DAC) for an effective Carbondioxide sequestration to address the global climate crisis. In this project, the LES simulation is carried out by incorporating scalar transport equations to NREL's SOWFA code. (ongoing project)

Health - global pandemic, COVID- 19

Mentored women junior PhD student for experimental and numerical validation of a novel filter, HyCu95 (Patent submitted), part of cluster of the projects related to the development of COVID-19 pandemic mitigation technologies in Castillo Research lab. (Journal article published in Nature scientific reports, COVID-19 edition) Read more

Health - Low-order modeling integration to NN, Brain Tumors

Mentored a junior Ph.D. student on the application of low-order modeling, POD, on the brain MRI images for optimistic detection of brain tumor integrated with artificial neural networks. (ongoing project)