COURSE INFO

2025-present. Cognitive Neuroscience

I get to cover my favorite topics in this class, which ironically made it the most challenging class for me to teach at first. We approach these topics from an experimental perspective, and I really encourage student inquiry. Students build their “experimental design muscles” as we cover the pros and cons of different experiments with the goal of designing an experiment on a specific cognitive neuroscience topic that interests them. I see writing, reading comprehension, and critical thinking skills change drastically throughout the course, which is the most rewarding experience for me.

2023-present. Introduction in Neuroscience. Augusta University

I feel extremely fortunate to teach the Introduction in Neuroscience course as part of AU’s new BS in Neuroscience. I get to share my enthusiasm with amazing students at all levels of their undergraduate career. This year the first cohort of students graduated and I still remember each of them sitting in our very first Neuroscience science class. I am so proud of how far they have come. The biggest challenge for this course is that students come in with a variety of scientific backgrounds, and I do my best to ensure we end up on the same page.

2016-2021. Mental Lexicon. University of Pais Vasco (UPV/EHU), University of the Basque Country.

I had the pleasure of teaching a class on one of my favorite topics, the neuroanatomy of speech lexical processing for 6 years in a row during my time at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). This course was part of the Master’s program in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language.

I loved teaching this class! It was an intensive student-centered course that immersed students in research topics focused on the neural basis of spoken language processes.

The course required students to read papers, make presentations, write papers, and have many class discussions. An overall class goal was to work together to piece the parts of the puzzle that fit language processes onto the brain while also capturing some of the nuances of ongoing debates about mapping these processes and identifying open questions. A sample syllabus is provided here.

My favorite part of teaching this class was also the most challenging part. The students came from different academic and cultural backgrounds. I worked hard to craft the course in such a way that would make the main concepts accessible to everyone. I tried to improve the ways I captured the importance of methodological details and how they contribute to the interpretation of the results without losing student engagement.