Teaching
Teaching, for me, is the place where industry-engaged research gets tested with students, and where the institutional infrastructure of the field gets either reinforced or built. The work below spans a single Coursera course, a curricular program serving more than 1,300 Illinois Tech students, and small co-taught studios across SAIC and Northwestern.
Currently teaching
Faculty appointment in the Department of Humanities, Lewis College of Science and Letters, Illinois Institute of Technology.
- COM 380 / COM 525 — User Experience Research and Evaluation (Spring 2026)
- AAH 380 — Elements of Art (Fall 2025)
- COM 380 — Data Visualization and Communication (Fall 2024; Fall 2025)
- HUM 371 — Fundamentals of Game Design (Fall 2024)
Coursera and open courses
Data Visualization and the Art of Storytelling
Sole-instructor public course on data visualization as a medium of argument, offered as a module within Illinois Tech's Bachelor of Information Technology degree pathway. The course treats visualization not as a technical skill attached to analytics but as a rhetorical practice with its own history, conventions, and limits — a position I argue at length in the Visualization as Humanistic Medium research strand.
Curricular leadership
Communications and Emerging Media (CEM) Degree Program
Following appointment as Director of the Information Communications and Data Visualizations (ICDV) program, designed and implemented a redesigned degree pathway: closed the ICDV program and built the new CEM degree program in its place. Currently Program Director and Chair of the CEM Steering Committee.
IPRO Labs framework
Co-architected the IPRO Labs framework — the foundational course structure of Illinois Tech's IPRO Program, organized into five thematic labs: CommunityLab, CityLab, EducationLab, GameLab, and EnergyLab. Includes contractual structures around IP, communication norms with non-academic partners, and the curricular sequencing that prepares students to do industry-partnered work. See Industry-Engaged Pedagogy for the full argument.
The Art of Data Visualization
Eight-week cross-institutional graduate course pairing School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University faculty, treating data visualization as a design-research medium.
Mentorship at scale
Faculty of record for approximately 1,300+ undergraduate students across approximately 33 industry- and community-partnered IPRO studios at the Kaplan Institute, 2015–2024, with 25+ partner organizations ranging from Fortune 500 corporations to neighborhood nonprofits.
Selected IPRO studios
- Big Monster Toys Lab — Big Monster Toys (Spring 2023)
- IPRO Sports Lab — Wilson Sporting Goods (Spring 2022; Fall 2022; Spring 2023)
- VR and E-Sports Lab — Wilson Sporting Goods and VR Motion (Fall 2022)
- Smart City Lab — Underwriters Laboratories and Sargent & Lundy (Spring 2022)
- Designing the Future of the Departure Lounge — United Airlines and Infosys Strategic Consulting Group (Summer 2021)
- All-Sky Camera for Astronomical and Light Pollution Monitoring — Adler Planetarium (Spring 2019)
- Big Data Analytics for Fire Emergencies and Disaster Response — American Red Cross and Motorola Solutions Foundation (Summer 2017–Fall 2019)
- Innovations in Trucking Logistics for the Burnham Lakefront — Farpoint Development (Fall 2018; Spring 2019)
- Big Data Science and the Urban Experience — co-developed with IIT Institute of Design; Motorola Solutions Foundation, Microsoft (2015–2017)
Student startups mentored through the Kaplan Institute accelerator
- Phyesta — virtual physics-experiment platform
- Kolosseum — esports fantasy-team and competition platform
- HoneyCo — distributed local honey sales platform connecting urban beekeepers and farmers' markets
Current advisees
- Mia Eastland — Master of Communications, Department of Humanities, Illinois Tech (2026)
- Saumya Sukhthankar — undergraduate independent study (Spring 2026)
- Zhiyu Liu — A Digital Magazine on Dark Patterns Used in Modern Commercial Marketing (Spring 2026)
Teaching statement
Full teaching statement forthcoming. Short version: I treat industry-engaged studio teaching as a method, not a setting. The question that organizes my pedagogy is not whether students can complete a project for a real partner, but whether the structure of the studio — the partner's ask, the methods being acquired, the faculty scaffolding — lets students see clearly enough to act well.