For a copy of my teaching portfolio, please click HERE
Teaching Philosophy
I teach from the conviction that health is biological, social, political, and ethical at once. My job is to help future clinicians see how immigration law, incarceration, racism, language policy, and economic precarity set the terms on which care is possible. I call the core skill I am after structural listening: hearing a patient's story while also hearing the institutional and legal forces running underneath it. Across courses I combine ethical theory, social science, case discussion, and experiential learning, and I send students to work directly with community partners on immigrant health, prison health, harm reduction, and reproductive justice, so that the ethics they study has a referent in the world.
Teaching across the health professions
At the Lewis Katz School of Medicine I teach across medicine, dentistry, physician assistant studies, and the Master of Health Justice and Bioethics program, reaching several hundred learners a year in formats from graduate seminars to large lectures to small-group and community-engaged work. Courses I teach or direct include:
Community Engagement and Health Justice I & II: a field-based course in which students partner with community organizations on the ethical and structural dimensions of health disparities.
Critical Social Science and Bioethics: a graduate seminar on qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to studying health inequity.
Immigrant Health in the United States: a medical school elective on immigration policy, language access, and barriers to care.
Dental Ethics and Jurisprudence: a required course for dental students on professional identity, oral health inequity, and the ethics of contemporary practice.
Bioethics for Physician Assistant Students: clinical ethics connected to broader questions of health justice.
Curriculum and educational leadership
As Co-Director of Education at the Center for Health Justice and Bioethics, I help run the Master of Health Justice and Bioethics program, from curriculum and faculty collaboration to assessment, and I led the redesign of several core courses around community engagement and interdisciplinary research. As Director of Service Learning for the Lewis Katz School of Medicine, I oversee a year-long community engagement program for first-year medical students, placing them with Philadelphia organizations working on immigrant health, prison health education, and menstrual health equity. The aim throughout is to move service learning past volunteerism by pairing real community partnership with ethical reflection and scholarship
Mentorship
Mentoring is the part of the job I value most. I work with medical students, graduate students, and residents on research in immigrant healthcare access, prison health, and the social determinants of health, and many of these collaborations have become peer-reviewed papers and national conference presentations while the students were still in training. I think of mentorship less as supervision than as helping a student find a voice and turn an ethical commitment into research, practice, and leadership.
Recognition
My teaching has been recognized with the Educational Excellence Award from the Lewis Katz School of Medicine, reflecting sustained contributions to interdisciplinary education across multiple health professions programs.
Student evaluations consistently highlight the energy, intellectual rigor, and sense of purpose that characterize my courses. Many students describe these courses as transformative moments in their training, helping them connect their professional aspirations with broader questions of justice and community responsibility.