Teaching & Mentoring

Are you an undergraduate student interested in research?

I’m happy to discuss research opportunities through university programs including SOAR, SURF, and the Provost's Research Fellowships. E-mail me to request a meeting.

I teach two undergraduate courses at USC:

GESM 160g (Population and Social Change): This is a quantitative reasoning GE seminar designed to introduce freshman to demographic analysis. The course offers students an introduction to quantitative social science and demonstrates the value of quantitative analysis for studying social issues. The primary goals of the course are to teach students key measures and methods for analyzing population data and how to interpret visual representations of data. The course begins by introducing students to the state of the world’s population, highlighting variation in the demography of contemporary world regions. Building on this knowledge, the remainder of the course interrogates different population processes. For example, students learn different models of growth and how to estimate and track changes in the size of populations, calculate and compare fertility measures, calculate and interpret the life table, compare population pyramids, and calculate migration rates. In addition to mastering methods for studying macro-level population change, students work to quantify population processes of smaller aggregates such as urbanization, racial segregation, and household and family change. Weekly problem sets allow students to demonstrate the analytic skills they have acquired, and in class discussion and current events assignments enables them to imagine their broader social relevance. Students are often surprised by the statistics that they learn and the extent of inequality that defines our globe today.

SOCI 335 (Society and Population): The primary goal in this discussion-based course is for students to apply their sociological perspective to population processes. The course teaches students about key population processes—fertility, migration, and mortality—and how they influence, and are influenced by, a broad range of social issues. Each segment of the course directly engages the knowledge that students have acquired in their required sociology courses, including social theory and research methods, as well as other elective seminars, such as social problems. Assignments require students to conduct research, collect statistics, create visual representations of data, and describe and synthesize key population data points. Students report the course helps them to synthesize the sociology curriculum they have completed at USC.   

I also teach two graduate-level courses: 

SOCI 625 (Demographic Methods): This is as an applied methods course. Students learn key methods for studying populations including the life table, decomposition, and standardization, which they demonstrate mastery of through weekly problem sets. The final project requires that students submit a full analysis (or analysis plan) for the data they are currently using in their own research. The course offers students a strong foundation in demographic analysis.

SOCI 656 (Social Demography): This seminar course introduces PhD students to the field of demography and key demographic theories. In doing so, a primary goal of the seminar is to train students to synthesize readings, identify limitations and shortcomings of the research we review, and to identify the next logical steps of inquiry. To accomplish this goal, each week students read at least five research articles centered on an area of population studies and write a concise reflection paper. A team of students serve as discussion leaders each week, requiring that they identify common threads in their colleagues’ reflection papers and direct class discussion. The students develop an empirical paper over the course of the semester.