Teaching statement

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in development economics and political economy at U.C. Berkeley, with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. I strive to create a classroom environment that welcomes student involvement and creativity, often pausing  to gather questions, reactions, and counter-arguments from my students. No matter how large the class, I try to turn each lecture into a dialogue. I also regularly organize the development economics seminar and the student development lunch workshop at Berkeley, and am an active advisor of Ph.D. students, having served on over 130 Ph.D. dissertation committees, supervised multiple post-doctoral researchers, and advised many undergraduate thesis projects. I am honored to have received several teaching awards at Berkeley, including the Best Graduate Advisor Award (Economics Department Graduate Economics Association, 2004-05), the Distinguished Teaching Award in the Social Sciences Division (2003-04), the campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012, and the 2015 Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award. In 2017 I developed an open online course “Transparent and Open Social Science Research” through FutureLearn, together with Dr. Garret Christensen and other colleagues at BITSS.

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