About
I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) with over twenty years of teaching experience. I have been at UMBC since Fall 2024. Prior to that I spent twelve years teaching in the Middle East, primarily at Zayed University, along with holding a visiting assistant professor position at the University of the Virgin Islands and a position as an instructor at the University of Arizona.
Research interests
In particular, I am interested in the pedagogy of teaching all levels of geometry. Euclid’s Elements of Geometry reigned as the canonical text on geometry for two thousand years until the nineteenth century brought the realization that there are numerous examples of non-Euclidian geometries (projective, inversive, affine, hyperbolic, and elliptic geometries.) In 1872 Felix Klein provided a unifying theoretical framework which resulted in a single classification system for these disparate geometries. This was achieved by viewing each geometry as a space together with a group of transformations of the space. Indeed, these geometric transformations play an important role in art and graphic design. Tessellations, repeating patters, and symmetry of any kind, are graphical representations of underlying mathematical transformations. It is my hope that this will be the subject matter for a future book.
Teaching interests
Broadly speaking, my scholarly interests mainly focus teaching and pedagogy. First, I am interested in pedagogy and expository writing and have published three undergraduate-level textbooks. The first was published in 2018, the second in 2020, and the third in 2025. Second, I am interested in effective and interesting methods to teach mathematics and to assess and evaluate learning.
Education
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Ph D, Mathematics
— Arizona State University (2008) Dirac Structures in Pseudo-Gradient Systems with an Emphasis on Electrical Networks
- BA, Mathematics — University of Pennylvaina (1996)
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BS, Chemical Engineering
— University of Pennsylvania (1996) Ethanol Production from Zymomonas Mobilis in a Continuous Bioreactor