Teaching

I enjoy teaching and I generally take on teaching duties when I get the opportunity. During my post-doc at the University of Amsterdam I have designed and taught parts of courses at both BSc and MSc level.

• ‘Emergence in the natural sciences’ module in the course ‘Emergence’ aimed at first year Bachelor students of the interdisciplinary study program ‘beta-gamma’. My module consists out of 4 lectures where we explore examples of emergent properties and phenomena in statistical physics, computer science, theoretical ecology and network science. It combines theoretical concepts with hands-on computational exercises in Python, including simulations of various complex systems such as the Ising model, elementary cellular automata, and epidemic models on networks.
• ‘Non-equilibrium stochastic mechanics: emergence and renormalization’ is a module I taught in the Delta-ITP course ‘Advanced Topics in Theoretical Physics’ aimed at second year Master Students in Theoretical Physics. in four lectures, we covered some philosophical background on emergence, after which we treated chemical reaction networks at various levels of mathematical description. Starting with the chemical rate equations, we continued to a second-quantized stochastic formulation for the master equation, and finished at a full-fledged field theory for reaction-diffusion models. We saw how techniques from quantum field theory such as Feynman diagrams and the renormalization group can be applied to study out-of-equilibrium systems with diffusion-limited reactions. Click here for the lecture notes
• ‘Epidemic spreading processes’ guest lecture in ‘Theory of Complex Systems’ course for first year MSc students Physics and Computational Science. in this two-hour lecture I treat several modeling paradigms for epidemiologist and show how compartmental models can be understood as a mean-field approximation of a stochastic model. The stochastic model can be generalized to allow for network dynamics and we show how the network structure affects the spreading process.

In addition to these course, I have supervised several Master students research projects in (Theoretical) Physics and have served as expert supervisor for interdisciplinary research groups of BSc students within the UvA’s ‘beta-gamma’ program.