Pedagogy Fellows Program

The Pedagogy Fellows Program (PFP) for faculty and instructors supports UChicago academics in developing, extending, and revising fundamental teaching competencies. Selected faculty and instructors form a cohort of Fellows of the CCTL and engage in a series of practice-oriented workshops organized around peer-to-peer discussions, along with classroom observation and formative feedback provided by both other Fellows and CCTL pedagogy specialists. In parallel and in conversation with these activities, Fellows design (or revise) a course syllabus, sharing and discussing key elements as part of the workshops along the way. The PFP draws on the experiences and reflections of program participants, facilitating the sharing of ideas and strategies with colleagues from across the curriculum, and informing these conversations with insights from the literature on teaching and learning. Newer faculty and instructors benefit from the support and insights generated by the pedagogical community of practice, while more experienced instructors benefit from the opportunity to reflect on their approach and share experiences and insights with colleagues from across the University. 

Faculty and instructors who complete the program receive $1000 in professional development funds to capitalize on the new pedagogical insights cultivated by the experience. Those who complete the PFP have the option to apply to be an Associate Pedagogy Fellow, affiliating with the Center for an additional year by providing mentorship to the year’s cohort of Pedagogy Fellows and engaging in other activities to advance the work of the Center.

The application for the PFP opens over the summer for the upcoming academic year. Contact Joe Lampert (josephlampert@uchicago.edu) at any time with questions. 

Current Pedagogy Fellows

    Yukiko Asai

    Yukiko Asai

    Assistant Instructional Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
    Yukiko Asai is a labor economist at the Harris School focusing on family and childcare policies. She teaches two Harris "core" courses: Data Analytics I: Quantitative Analysis for evening Master’s students and Statistics for Data Analysis II for daytime Master’s in Public Policy (MPP) students. She also teaches an elective course, Workplace and Family Policy, which for both MPP students and undergraduates in the College. Yukiko infuses her teaching on workplace policies with rigorous empirical studies and examples from Asian, European, and U.S. experiences, helping to widen the worldview of her students, both domestic and international. Her primary pedagogical approach is to flip the classroom to encourage as much engagement as possible and group discussions to allow students to engage with each other. This allows students to share their perspectives and to discuss the labor economics theory they learn in class with each other.  

    Crystal Beiersdorfer

    Crystal Beiersdorfer 

    Lecturer, Department of Cinema & Media Studies, Program in Media Arts & Design, and the Humanities Collegiate Division  
    Crystal Beiersdorfer is a new media artist and a Media Arts and Design lecturer in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Within her teaching, she aims to foster an inclusive learning environment in which students can ask questions and make mistakes while exploring various topics, including digital culture and its influence on our identity, the creation of XR environments, and new media studio art. Her art practice examines how the body and digital spaces blend and clash against one another. The artwork also explores how users engage with technology and its control over their personal beliefs and daily routines. She has shown work nationally, internationally, and virtually. 

    Amanda Brock

    Amanda Brock 

    Assistant Instructional Professor, Biological Sciences Collegiate Division 
    Amanda Brock is a developmental biologist by training and is an instructor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division. She teaches introductory lab courses for biology majors (Genetics and Developmental Biology) and courses for non-majors to satisfy their biological sciences Core requirements. One of these courses, a newly designed inquiry-based course, aims for students to learn general biology through working on an individual research project in the lab. Amanda is eager to learn new pedagogical methods for implementing and assessing student learning in such an environment. 

    Kale Davies

    Kale Davies

    Assistant Instructional Professor, Mathematics Department  
    Kale Davies’s teaching focuses on mathematics courses for non-math majors. As an instructor, Kale enjoys constructing interesting conceptual questions that explore various ways of thinking about mathematical objects and ideas, and emphasizes how a balance between rigorous logic and intuition is often most effective when applying mathematics. His current teaching approach combines numerous pedagogical methods, such as ungrading, the flipped classroom, and mastery-based grading, in order to construct a course that focuses on collaborative learning and group work, as well as giving students opportunities to correct errors and focus on personal progress. Overall, Kale aims to teach in a way that makes math more accessible, and he is excited to continue learning new ideas in order to achieve this. 

    Caterina Fugazzola 

    Assistant Senior Instructional Professor, Global Studies  
    Caterina Fugazzola’s research interests include transnational politics, gender and sexuality studies, and video game studies. She teaches courses on new media analysis, digital ethnography, transnational queer organizing, and video games and global politics. Teaching and pedagogical development is one of her favorite parts of being an academic. Caterina is particularly interested in developing pedagogical approaches that promote a cooperative and active learning environment through the incorporation of new technologies into the classroom. She is currently working on integrating virtual reality and augmented reality experiences into her courses, using immersive experiences in virtual spaces as a way to generate conversations on embodied affect and cognition, contemporary moral panics, and global sociopolitical tensions.   

    Daragh Grant

    Daragh Grant 

    Assistant Senior Instructional Professor and Co-Chair, Classics of Social and Political Thought  
    Daragh Grant is the co-chair of the Classics of Social and Political Thought Core sequence. For the past decade or so, most of his teaching has involved small seminar classes focused on social and political theory. In these classes, his interest is as much in cultivating students’ skills as writers, readers, listeners, and speakers as it is in developing their content knowledge. The UChicago Core curriculum offers an ideal vehicle for marrying these objectives. Daragh is fortunate to have worked with students here who are not only engaged and generous interlocutors, but also willing to put in the difficult work of learning anew what it is to write and think critically as part of a scholarly community. He also teaches classes on the history of empire and colonialism, which is the focus of his own scholarly research. 

    Tori Gross

    Tori Gross 

    Assistant Senior Instructional Professor of Anthropology and Assistant Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) 
    Tori Gross is Assistant Senior Instructional Professor of Anthropology and Assistant Director of MAPSS. Her research focuses on the affective dimensions of identity politics, the generative intersection of national imaginaries and global neoliberal values, and the gendered production of parastate sovereignty in the context of India’s young, rapidly changing democracy. She teaches courses for MA and undergraduate students focused on social science theory, neoliberalism as a lived ideology, and ethnographic approaches to the study of political and politicized life. As an instructor, Tori aims to expose students to a wide range of theoretical perspectives and support them in the development of their social science research skills and imagination. 

    Esmael J. Haddadian

    Esmael J. Haddadian 

    Instructional Professor, Biological Sciences Collegiate Division  
    Esmael J. Haddadian is an instructional professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division, specializing in teaching interdisciplinary courses. The primary aim of these courses is to empower students with the skills to proficiently integrate and apply quantitative and computational techniques in the analysis and modeling of biological systems. Esmael finds the opportunity to engage with exceptionally talented students to be the most rewarding aspect of teaching at the University of Chicago. 

    Jieun Kim

    Jieun Kim 

    Senior Lecturer in Korean Language  
    Jieun Kim is a Senior Lecturer in modern Korean. She has taught all levels of Korean, and currently she is teaching an intermediate-level class with a mixture of heritage and non-heritage learners. As the abilities of these two groups are quite different, she designs class activities in a way that allows students to benefit from each other rather than feel intimidated. Additionally, she hopes to raise their cultural competency in addition to their linguistic knowledge so that they can behave in culturally appropriate ways no matter their linguistic competency. 

    Sarah B. King

    Sarah B. King 

    Assistant Professor of Chemistry  
    In the five years that she has been teaching at UChicago, Sarah King has taught both graduate coursework in physical chemistry as well as Honors General Chemistry. Her passion is in integrating scientific communication into the standard science curriculum as a way to develop critical skills for scientific practice while providing multiple opportunities for students to build their competency in the classroom. Sarah particularly hopes to create a more dynamic and active learning environment even in a large lecture class. Her favorite thing about teaching UChicago students is their deep curiosity about science and passion for using science for the good of humanity. 

    Hannah Lant

    Hannah Lant 

    Assistant Instructional Professor of Chemistry  
    Hannah Lant is an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Department of Chemistry. She greatly enjoys working with the wide diversity of students she teaches: first year undergraduates launching their scientific explorations in the General Chemistry series, senior Chemistry majors in their laboratory capstone course Experimental Physical Chemistry, and non-STEM students in her Chemistry of Artist's Materials course in the Physical Sciences Core. She promotes scientific literacy skills at all levels through experiential laboratory exercises and strives to foster friendly learning environments that uphold the values of mutual respect, community, and inclusion. 

    Hannah Morgan

    Hannah Morgan 

    Assistant Instructional Professor, Department of Computer Science  
    Hannah Morgan is an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Computer Science Department, mostly teaching introductory programming courses to undergraduate students. She also spearheads the first computer science course for the incoming Computational Analysis and Public Policy (CAPP) students, which focuses heavily on programming real-world applications. She enjoys creating assignments that model and simulate events, which challenge students to use computational skills to solve real problems. She also enjoys working with the CAPP students, who are eager to learn and be challenged, so they can use computation to solve problems in the real world when they graduate.

    Amy Nussbaum

    Amy Nussbaum 

    Assistant Instructional Professor, Data Science Institute  
    Amy Nussbaum joined the Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago in Autumn 2022. She teaches a wide variety of courses across the data science curriculum, including introductory courses in data science and machine learning as well as mathematical methods in data science. No matter the content, she strives to create an inclusive environment where all students can learn both the skills they need to succeed as data scientists as well as how to communicate their findings. She loves that University of Chicago students want to learn and seeing all of the ways they challenge themselves! 

    Mehrnoush Soroush

    Mehrnoush Soroush 

    Assistant Professor of Landscape Archaeology, Director of the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes  
    Mehrnoush Soroush is a landscape archaeologist, investigating the evidence for long-term human activity beyond the actual living areas themselves, including irrigation systems, road networks, agricultural fields, and so on. She teaches a core course on the Achaemenid Empire, a two-quarter course called Ancient Landscapes. The common theme in her teaching is encouraging curiosity about ancient cultures, archaeological landscapes, the way the past informs our present and future, as well as theories and methods of representing the physical world in the two-dimensional space of maps. In the classroom, Mehrnoush cares about making the topic of the course exciting and relevant to students' living experiences, making everyone feel safe, welcome, and included to engage in conversations and express their opinions. Since she started teaching at UChicago in the fall of 2022, she has found students to be extremely curious and bright, motivating her to work harder and become a better teacher. 

    Zhao Wang

    Zhao Wang 

    Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts in Computational Social Science Program 
    Zhao is an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Masters in Computational Social Science (MACSS) program. She is trained as a computer scientist focusing on machine learning, natural language processing, and social media analysis. She mainly focuses on teaching and developing computational courses for social science students (e.g., Computer Science with Social Science Applications, Introduction to Machine Learning). She enjoys teaching and working with UChicago students because they are always willing to take on challenges and push their boundaries. Her pedagogical goals are to be professional and passionate, and to cultivate students' talents to the utmost. 

    Rui Zhao

    Rui Zhao 

    Associate Instructional Professor, Economics  
    Rui Zhao has taught macroeconomics from the principles to PhD topic courses at both public and private institutions. At UChicago, she teaches methods classes for Economics major students in both the standard track and the business track. She enjoys teaching students in her courses with a variety of prior knowledge bases and skill sets. When UChicago students face a challenge, they are willing to work and develop their knowledge and skills in response. She is always interested in learning how to support a student body with diverse background knowledge so that all of them can get more out of their learning.  

Past Pedagogy Fellows

    • Nicole G. Burgoyne, Assistant Instructional Professor of Germanic Studies and the Humanities Collegiate Division
    • Christopher M. Clapp, Assistant Instructional Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
    • Jon Clindaniel, Assistant Senior Instructional Professor & Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies, Computational Social Science
    • Marshall Jean, Assistant Instructional Professor of Sociology (MAPSS)
    • Sarah Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Law, Letters, and Society
    • Jessica Kirzane, Assistant Instructional Professor in Yiddish in the Department of Germanic Studies
    • Jeffrey A. Levy, Assistant Instructional Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
    • Fei Liu, Assistant Instructional Professor of Statistics
    • Jon Satrom, Assistant Senior Instructional Professor and Associate Director, Media Arts & Design in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies
    • Colin Shelton, Assistant Instructional Professor and Language Program Coordinator for Latin and Ancient Greek
    • S Simmons, Assistant Instructional Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
    • Scott A. Snyder, Professor of Chemistry and Deputy Dean for Professional Programs in the Physical Sciences Division
    • Alison Anastasio, Assistant Instructional Professor, Program on the Global Environment 
    • Colleen M. Grogan, Professor, Crown Family School & Director of the Graduate Program for Health Policy Administration & Policy (GPHAP) 
    • Maeve Hooper, Director of the German Language Program & Senior Assistant Instructional Professor, Germanic Studies 
    • Russell P. Johnson, Assistant Director, Undergraduate Religious Studies Program & Core Sequence, Divinity School 
    • Elizabeth W. Kovar, Associate Senior Instructional Professor, Biological Sciences Collegiate Division 
    • Valerie Levan, Assistant Senior Instructional Professor in the College & Humanities Core Pedagogy Coordinator 
    • Xiaoying Liu, Associate Senior Instructional Professor, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering 
    • Shaunna McLeod, Assistant Instructional Professor, Chemistry 
    • Gina Pieters, Assistant Instructional Professor, Economics 
    • Lisa Rosen, Assistant Senior Instructional Professor & Associate Director of Instructional Programs, The Committee on Education 
    • Adam Shaw, Associate Senior Instructional Professor, Computer Science 
    • Ardaman Shergill, Assistant Professor of Medicine 
    • Matthias Staisch, Associate Director & Assistant Senior Instructional Professor, Committee on International Relations 
    • Megan Tusler, Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities 
    • Erin Galgay Walsh, Assistant Professor, New Testament & Early Christian Literature, Divinity School 
    • Jancey Wickstrom, Assistant Instructional Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice 
    • Tyler J. Zimmer, Assistant Instructional Professor, Philosophy