Teaching

I teach courses at a variety of different levels in the UCLA Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) department. I am also involved in a number of community teaching efforts such as the annual incoherent scatter radar summer school.

Upcoming AOS Courses

Winter 2023: AOS/EPSS M7
Perils of Space: Introduction to Space Weather

This general education course introduces space physics for all students with no math or science prerequisites. Topics covered include the Sun, the solar cycle, solar flares and solar eruptions, the solar wind, Earth’s magnetosphere, the Van Allen Radiation Belts, Earth’s upper atmosphere and ionosphere, auroras, and the low Earth orbit (LEO) space environment. The course will discuss applications of space physics to technology and society, including satellite drag and space traffic management, disruptions to satellite communications, radiation hazards to satellites and astronauts, and geomagnetic effects on the electric power grid.

Spring 2023: AOS 205B
Introduction to Solar-Terrestrial Physics

This first-year graduate level course provides a foundation for future study of geospace science, with a particular focus on the Earth’s upper atmosphere and ionosphere. Topics covered include the vertical structure of the upper atmosphere, ionospheric photochemistry, transport phenomena in partially ionized plasmas, ionospheric electrodynamics, and magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling.

Annual Incoherent Scatter Radar Summer School

The IS radar summer school is an annual one-week training course sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The course provides graduate and advanced undergraduate students with hands-on experience using IS radars for atmospheric and ionospheric science. All the course materials from the most recent school are freely available at tinyurl.com/2022ISR. This includes links to prerecorded lecture videos and a GitHub repository of lecture examples as Jupyter notebooks. More information on how to apply to future schools will be available at amisr.com/school/.