Teaching


Through my diverse teaching and work experience, I developed an active-learning teaching style that engages students with the course material through online lectures and interactive class sessions. A collection of courses, past and present, are described below.

Virginia Commonwealth University

As an Assistant Professor at VCU, I developed two new courses in cyber-physical systems. I also overhauled the Digital Logic Design course to use a fully flipped classroom and design projects for lab. I also mentored six different Capstone Design teams.

Modeling and Control of Cyber-physical Systems

This course builds students’ experience with modeling, simulating, and controlling cyber-physical systems (CPS). Students will learn the fundamentals of modeling linear and nonlinear dynamical systems, including the numerical methods necessary to simulate and evaluate them. Additionally, students will develop their skills modeling discrete dynamics, such as state machines, within the context of control. State-space control theory techniques, such as state and output feedback, as well as advanced topics in nonlinear control will be used to build controllers for modern CPS. Additional topics in estimation and control over networks will be explored. The course’s lab will allow students to make course concepts concrete by applying mathematical, programming, and systems engineering skills.

Semester taught: Spring 2023

Autonomous Cyber-physical Systems

In the near future, autonomous cyber-physical systems will be deployed into many facets of the global economy: from transportation to advanced manufacturing. This course introduces the architectures and algorithms that enable the development and deployment of mobile, autonomous cyber-physical systems. Students will develop systems that perceive and take action in the physical world using control-theoretic and machine learning techniques. This course reinforces theory with practical assignments that leverage software tools common in the autonomous system community.

Semesters taught: Fall 2020, 2021

Digital Logic Design

An introduction to digital logic design with an emphasis on practical design techniques and circuit implementations. Topics include number representation in digital computers, Boolean algebra, theory of logic functions, mapping techniques and function minimization, design of combinational, clocked sequential and interactive digital circuits such as comparators, counters, pattern detectors, adders and subtractors. Asynchronous sequential circuit concepts are introduced. Students will use the above basic skills in the laboratory to design and fabricate digital logic circuits. For this course I developed an full series of introductory videos.

Semesters taught: Spring-Fall 2021, Spring-Fall 2022

Capstone Design

I developed and managed six different Capstone Design teams from 2020-2023. These projects ranged from autonomous river sensors to fruit picking robot manipulators.

MITRE Corporation

While working at MITRE I had the opportunity to teach technical and non-technical staff about machine learning. These experiences prepared me for online learning due to the high number of employees that took my course from corporate locations around the US.

Machine Learning: Beyond the Buzz

This one day course introduces the audience to the broad field of machine learning. It explains to students the requirements, advantages, and  disadvantages of machine learning enabled capabilities. Students will be able to see beyond the buzz and focus on the useful tools that machine learning can provide. This course was taught in a fully online modality during May 2021 and 2022.

Introduction to Machine Learning

This two day lab course teaches technical professionals core theoretical concepts and algorithms in machine learning. The active lectures blend short exercises with applied lab work. Some subjects covered include clustering, linear regression, decision trees, and deep neural networks. Students learn how to apply popular Python machine learning libraries, such as sklearn and keras.

York College of Pennsylvania

After my PhD at Georgia Tech, I served as an Assistant Professor in the YCP ECE program. I applied all of my prior teaching experience and training at the Bucknell How to Engineer Engineering Education workshop to develop engaging undergraduate engineering courses.

Applied Control

This course introduced students to the fundamental principles and applications of applied control. Topics include analytical techniques for digital control, design using transform and state space methods, and multi-input, multi-output systems. The laboratory is dedicated to hardware implementation of proportional, integral, derivative (PID) control and other advanced controllers, as well as computational methods for discrete system analysis and controller design. This course also presented advanced topics from distributed control systems. Students developed and deployed their synthesized controllers on National Instruments Compact RIO platforms.

Semesters taught: Spring 2011 through 2015

Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering

This course covered topics in AC and DC linear circuit analysis including Kirchhoff’s Laws, voltage and current division, nodal and mesh analyses, superposition, equivalent circuits and power, and the role of circuit components. Steady-state AC circuit topics such as phasors, impedance, frequency response, filtering, damping, resonance, and power were also covered. This course used the active learning and flipped classroom structure I developed in my Engineering Physics E&M course.

Engineering Physics: E&M

This course introduced the student to the topics of static electricity, electric fields, Gauss’ Law, electric potential, capacitance, resistance, current, voltage, simple electric circuits, magnetic fields, Ampere’s Law, Faraday’s Law, and inductance. This course pioneered a flipped classroom structure at York College, using online lectures that introduced students to the core concepts that would be fleshed out in the classroom discussion and exercises.

Capstone Design

This capstone design course required the careful instruction and management of a team of senior ECE students in a team project. For three of the four year I instructed, we attended the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC). Another year, the students developed a prototype bike sharing system for the campus and surrounding community.