Teaching

Teaching & Mentorship

Courses, research mentorship, and materials from my teaching at UC Santa Barbara.

Summer 2026Research Mentor

Research Mentorship Program (RMP)

Mentored a four-week protein-folding project, from an HP lattice environment and REINFORCE benchmarks to a final report and presentation.

Project proposal ↗

Accelerated Convergence in Glassy Energy Landscapes via Variational Learning

The proposal explores gradient-estimating and learning-based optimization for protein folding and spin-glass models. It asks how efficiently these methods navigate rugged energy landscapes and whether a variational optimizer generalizes to held-out problem instances.

Content sample: The variational learning loop
Proposal diagram showing parameter updates, a probability distribution, an energy-based model, and an optimization loop
Figure 2 from the proposal: sample configurations, evaluate their energies, and update the distribution through learned parameters. Open source ↗
Summer 2026Instructor

Probabilistic Computing

Designed and taught INT 93LS–001, with lecture notes and executable notebooks on sampling, discrete optimization, and stochastic neural networks.

Lecture notes ↗ Course notebooks ↗ Course catalog ↗ Course description →
Content sample: Metropolis–Hastings inside a half-circle
Play the animation to follow accepted moves from the course notebook. The sampler proposes nearby points and rejects moves outside the upper half-circle; the blue path connects accepted states. Open notebook ↗