As a scholar of the organizations that shape housing and homelessness, I am committed to addressing the institutional origin and reproduction of inequality in both my research and teaching. My teaching is guided by the belief that my role is to prepare all students, across backgrounds and diverse educational experiences, to intervene in the social problems of their communities—as voters, neighbors, professionals, and sometimes as researchers. To do so, I aim to (1) teach students how to use sociological theories and modes of inquiry to understand the social world around them, (2) build students’ research skills that are applicable beyond the classroom, and (3) develop students’ confidence as creative thinkers that can bring new ideas to bear on entrenched debates.
At UCLA, I have been the primary instructor for Introductory Sociology, Introduction to Sociological Research Methods, and Researching Los Angeles’s Housing Crisis—the latter being a course that I designed and delivered through UCLA’s Collegium of University Teaching Fellows program. I have also served as a Teaching Assistant for Contemporary Social Theory, Collective Behavior, and Economy and Society. I have received the department’s Excellence in Teaching Award for every year that I taught, was the recipient of the department’s top teaching award—the Kollock Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award—and was nominated by my department for the UCLA-wide Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2026, I was awarded Sage Publishing’s Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award.
In each of these courses, I integrate my teaching philosophy throughout the syllabus and classroom experience. First, I center the ability of social science research to intervene in social problems, which connects students to the real-world consequences of the material we cover. In my Introduction to Sociological Research Methods course, for example, we began the first day of class by examining the flawed research behind popular public health claims on social media, which served as a platform for students to develop mixed-methods studies on topics including social media use among teens and the impact of AI use on college students’ education goals.
Second, each of my courses incorporates research skill building, which I believe is equally applicable inside and outside of the university. As a nontraditional community college student who made my way to a liberal arts college, I know from lived experience that all students do not arrive to my classroom with the skills that engaging with advanced academic material and research require. I found early on that many students struggled to draw conclusions from a body of work as a whole, which limited their ability to understand and contribute to academic debates. In class, students participated in an activity that incrementally moved them from summary to synthesis. After a short lecture on the meanings of summary, analysis, and synthesis, students worked together to learn how to write all three: on days with two assigned readings, each student summarized one reading in a sentence or two, paired with a classmate who summarized the same reading to write a one-sentence analysis, and then joined a pair who analyzed the other reading to write a one-sentence synthesis of the two.
As a frequent instructor for lower division courses, I also use scaffolding to orient students to longer-form writing assignments. In all of my courses, students work up to longer writing assignments through smaller, incremental steps, paired with direct instruction on how to complete them successfully. In Researching Los Angeles’s Housing Crisis, the final assignment was a research proposal that responded to a housing-related research question. To get there, students turned in and received feedback on their research question, an annotated bibliography, a memo on data, methods, and feasibility, and a full literature review draft. This structure offers the opportunity to receive feedback, which encouraged students to attend office hours more frequently to receive one-on-one support for their writing and improve their final submission.
Third, my classroom activities ask students to play an active role in imagining new ways of organizing social life. In my course on Los Angeles's housing crisis, students struggled to grasp how thoroughly zoning shapes their experience of the city. In lieu of a lecture, students used blank maps of the Los Angeles region and colored markers to invent a zoning code and rezone the city. Most students designated large swaths of the city for multifamily housing and public parks. When we compared their maps to the real zoning map of Los Angeles, students saw that zoning is not a neutral technical instrument, but rather a record of whose interests the city protects and how policy changes have the power to fundamentally reshape how residents experience the city. This activity was covered by UCLA’s Teaching and Learning Center Newsroom and various UCLA-affiliated social media channels.
My success as a teacher is a result of leveraging holistic evaluation to improve my pedagogy over time. I use multiple methods to evaluate my teaching practices, including self-reflection, peer and mentor feedback, student surveys, and student evaluations. Over my three courses, for example, I revised my activity to teach synthesis after each time I taught it, ultimately favoring a more interactive activity over one that relied more on lecture. I also analyze student work directly. In my most recent course, weekly short writing assignments on the assigned readings required students to synthesize arguments across texts, and I tracked how their synthesis skills developed over the term. I read end-of-term evaluations against these measures rather than reading them in isolation.
Outside of the classroom, I have a special interest in mentoring undergraduate research. I have mentored undergraduates through award-winning senior theses in the social sciences and humanities as a Graduate Mentor for the UCLA Keck Program and through sociology theses as a Mentor and Co-Coordinator of the UCLA Sociology’s Honors Thesis program. In this capacity, I work with students through project conceptualization, data collection, analysis, and writing. A recent mentee was struggling to navigate difficult dynamics between herself and her interview subjects. Meeting with her weekly, I drew on my experience with interviews and fieldwork to advise her on how to leverage her positionality, adjust the interview protocol in response to the field, and use the dynamic between herself and her subject as a useful source of data. At the end of our work together, she wrote me to say that this advice helped her complete her thesis when she was losing confidence. She will be beginning her PhD at Princeton in the fall.