Undergraduate Mentoring

For undergraduate education, I have fostered peer mentoring by undergraduate students. Several seniors have acted as undergraduate TAs in charge of programming assignments and tutoring of their younger peers. To expose students to research, juniors in a data structures course completed a research paper for which they had to do scientific literature research, a significant implementation, and class presentations. All papers were collected in class proceedings which were distributed to all the students []. In the classroom, I believe in emphasizing learning rather than teaching. For this purpose, quizes, and supplementary materials such as interactive tutorials and MD simulations will be put on the web using the WebCT technology at Notre Dame. The collaboratory infrastructure developed in this project will provide a valuable educational tool. In later stages, I plan to develop ``learning modules'' for the Engineering Learning Center, where students may use audiovisual capabilities to work on interactive MD simulations.

Finally, I am undertaking several initiatives to reach out to undergraduate students, particularly Hispanics and women. I serve as an advisor for Notre Dame's chapter of the Society of Hispanics Professionals in Engineering (SHPE) and Mexican Association of Engineering Students (MAES), and I am in contact with institutions of higher learning in Latin America to promote the exchange of undergraduate students with the United States. I am also starting a chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, an honor society for the computing sciences [], and will be co-advisor of the student chapter of the ACM. Another exciting project in which I want to invite undergraduate students is the organization of a congress on directions of computer science. In the department, I will be involved in revising the curriculum in computer science. One of my goals is to establish tracks of specialization for CS majors, one of which would include computational science, particularly biology. Finally, another goal is to offer a computational biology course that could be taken in lieu of physics.