Teaching Experience

After attaining my PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics I spent two years as a teacher for the Minor Programmeren of the University of Amsterdam. This minor program of 30 ECTS is open to bachelor students from all faculties. I enjoyed teaching students from diverse academic fields with different points of view and approaches. Through teaching I honed my ability to explain technical matters to a diverse audience.

The subjects I taught for the Minor Programmeren were introductions to programming and data visualization. The former courses covered C and Python, while the latter covered visualization best practices and core web technologies.

For the master's program Astronomy and Astrophysics I created the course Basic Linux and Coding for Astronomy and Astrophysics. I wrote the teaching materials for this course and taught the classes. Students learned to use the Linux command line and to write Python programs to perform basic data analysis tasks. To keep things interesting to an audience of astronomers I created assignments around publicly available astronomical datasets. My course helped students perform well in subsequent courses where programming was required and to work more efficiently during their thesis research.

I bring the ability to explain technical solutions to all stakeholders in the projects I work on.