Our Faculty

I am eager to help my students experience the joy of learning about the world. I have found that students learn the most from an engaging learning environment in which they constantly interact with their peers as well as the professor and apply the concepts learned from the class to real-world examples.

My approach to teaching is to present topics in a logical and organized fashion while connecting them to real-world applications, making the content more relevant and relatable. … As an instructor, I work hard to establish trusting and productive relationships with students and establish an environment where students feel comfortable and supported.

I tell stories through images, static or moving, often using performance to ground them. My influences represent a broad swath of interests that include abstraction, politics, humor, feminism, and art history. … By calling into question how we understand history and the elusive nature of truth, my work reveals the subjectivity of both.

Working with undergraduates in the research lab is the most rewarding aspect of my position. While I could perform the experiments myself, it is much more enjoyable to work with students.

I am passionate about helping students understand that struggle is not a sign of incapability. In fact, productive struggle is a necessary part of achieving their goals. I am interested in thinking about how we teach this kind of mindset to offer even more value to our students.

As students come from diverse backgrounds, it is important for them to learn to engage with one another’s thoughts and ideas on a level of civility and mutual respectfulness, especially when discussing a subject as potentially contentious as religion. I try to impart this conviction through the atmosphere of openness I cultivate in my classroom.

I joined Lafayette because I loved that I could teach undergraduates in a multidisciplinary department and engage in a broader community of learning that reached across the College. I’m interested in many different subjects and am lucky enough to be able to learn from colleagues all across campus.

I’m a geologist who specializes in volcanoes. I want to know why and how magma bodies form, evolve, destabilize, and erupt. … It’s exhilarating to see students have that first ‘aha!’ moment in research—whether it happens on the side of a volcano in Iceland, looking down a microscope in my lab, or plotting data to test a hypothesis.