I have considerable teaching experience having taught a total of 33 different courses at UCLA, Princeton and City Tech, from precalculus to deterministic and stochastic modeling with Monte Carlo simulations, financial derivatives, risk management, numerical methods, applied Fourier analysis, computational statistics, honors linear algebra, differential geometry, abstract algebra, real analysis, honors linear algebra, complex analysis, etc. often using modern technology such as R, Maple, Matlab and Mathematica. Consequently, I have had experience teaching students with very different background, abilities, aspirations and interests.

I am a big fan of the statistical computing environment R, which I have been using since 2006 as a finance student at Princeton and later in the financial industry. Nowadays, I am using R exclusively through its IDE RStudio, whose public beta version was first released in 2011. I have been incorporating R in a number of upper-level courses in the applied mathematics program since 2012. I see a bright future for R and its IDE RStudio for creating interactive mathematics visualizations, simulations and animations. R offers a lot more than just a programming language for doing statistical and data analysis, being the software of choice for doing modern data science.

Even when I worked in the financial industry, I found the most rewarding part of my job to be preparing teaching materials for our interns at the Quantitative Summer Institute, as well as a collection of job interview problems in mathematics, finance and coding. I always felt fulfilled by my role in helping students meet their educational goals. Over the years, a number of students have told me that I had changed their views of mathematics or that they had changed their majors as a result of taking my courses. It was a revelation to me that I could have such an impact on somebody’s life trajectory.