My teaching experience extends to neuroscience, computer science, and writing. At Cornell I've taught an advanced, writing-intensive undergraduate seminar on autism and the development of social cognition, as well as an introductory lecture course on basic neuroscience. At Cambridge I supervised for Neurobiology Part 1B, a second-year course in basic medical neurobiology. At MIT, where boundaries between disciplines are rather more loose than at Cambridge, I taught technical writing for several years, as well as expository writing and a freshman seminar on autism. I was affiliated both with the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, which organises instruction in writing for students from all departments, and with the MIT Experimental Study Group, a freshman-year option providing small-group in a seminar format. Also at MIT I taught a non-credit introduction to C programming each January, and volunteered as an instructor of neuroscience and computer science in a weekend programme for local high school students.

As an undergraduate and postgraduate student, I taught an intensive summer course in computer science for junior high and high school students with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. I also co-developed and taught a multidisciplinary introduction to neuroscience as part of the same programme. I later moved my computer science course to the Duke University Talent Identification Program.

A year after I finished my undergraduate studies, I returned to Cornell as artist-in-residence at Risley Residential College for the Creative and Performing Arts, where I taught a non-credit course on letterpress printmaking and book arts, directed in a student theatre programme, and advised a student literary magazine.

I'm a strong supporter of the integration of classroom and residential learning, and for involving students as partners in defining the environments in which they're expected to live and to work. In addition to my work in a residential college for the arts at Cornell, I was a heavily involved in the undergraduate residence system at MIT. During my first year in Boston I participated in one of several residence system design teams, and was the principal author of our report to the Institute on integrating individual residence-based communities with the larger Institute community. I trained as a mediator with the MIT Office of Student Conflict Resolution and Discipline, and served for several years as a residence hall fellow and a freshman advisor.

My teaching experiences have taught me how to centre a course on the students rather than on the teacher, to work with each student's profile of cognitive strengths, and to draw out the subject during discussion and active learning. I discovered early on that good teaching has a great deal in common with good theatre; to engage an audience one must connect with the subject not only intellectually but emotionally. I'm especially interested in teaching that bridges disciplines, and I hope to implement a course that links neuroscience and developmental psychology to literature and the arts, incorporating perspectives from disability studies and cognitive literary theory.

I'm also very keen on making writing a significant component of my courses. A great many students of the sciences never stop to consider the reality that scientific observations must be communicated and interpreted within narrative frames: whether it's a question of transfer of power through a drive train, flow of control through a computer program, or integration of genes from a viral vector, there is always some plot line onto which the subject's many dimensions can be projected as narrative, and some set of themes that the author means to evoke. Writing in scientific disciplines can be an opportunity for students to consider such concepts and to learn the art involved in communicating science.