Teaching & Communication
Teaching & Communication
Teaching materials, talks, and explainers for scientific data work.
My teaching work has grown out of collaborative efforts to help scientists learn data analysis, statistical reasoning, and computational workflows. I am especially interested in materials that make technical ideas visual, practical, and easier to connect to real scientific questions.
Recognition
Teaching Materials
Modern Data Analysis (MODA)
MODA: Modern Data Analysis is a notebook-based course for biomedical scientists learning data analysis, visualization, estimation statistics, and reproducible computational workflows. I co-developed it with Joses Ho and Adam Claridge-Chang as a collaborative teaching resource for medical and graduate students. Beyond using notebooks as teaching documents, we used nbdev to keep dependencies organized and make the student installation experience smoother.
Course site ↗ GitHub ↗A note on literate programming: I first came to nbdev through Adam Claridge-Chang, who pointed me toward Jeremy Howard’s work on notebooks as a home for code, documentation, tests, and teaching. In practice, this is not only elegant; it makes teaching materials easier to run, inspect, maintain, and install. Quarto extends the same spirit across websites, papers, talks, and teaching pages, keeping analysis and explanation close together. This is now the main way I document code and turn computational work into something others can follow.
Explainers
I also write compact explainers for statistical and measurement ideas that come up in our work: Goodhart’s law, fly feeding data, and what single metrics miss; interactions, delta-deltas, and uncertainty; and Whorlmap, a visualization experiment for showing uncertainty inside dense heatmaps. These pieces are meant to make the reasoning behind the methods easier to inspect, reuse, and discuss.
Talks
I have been invited to give talks internationally and locally, including a CoSyNe 2019 workshop talk on dorsal raphe serotonin and intertemporal choice (slides ↗), and an APDNC3 / RIKEN 2024 talk on high-dimensional Drosophila feeding behavior and satiety-state analysis. I also received an Outstanding Short Talk Award at Neuroscience Singapore 2025 for work on multimodal transcriptomic mapping of neural states.