Jennifer Ross

Jennifer Ross

Jennifer Ross is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The Ross Lab in broadly interested in how cells autonomously sense, decide, and respond to produce motion, force, and work. The cell is able to couple thermal and active (energy-using) “ratchets” that self-organize to perform this work. This ability to do work by harnessing noisy, random systems is a frontier area of research for soft, active, and biological condensed matter physics. The Ross Lab focuses on biological systems in order to learn fundamental physics principles of how they are able to act autonomously, specifically we have focused on the cytoskeleton.

How to become an effective teacher
Jenny Ross and Jake Shechter

Do your future career plans involve policy, graduate school, K12, or almost any other scientific profession? If so, then explaining ideas to others (aka teaching) will be part of your job! In this session, we will explore some of the basic principles of what is known as “active learning.” In this style of teaching, students work to construct knowledge in the classroom with the teacher as a guide as opposed to a dispenser of information. We will share some of the evidence for this mode of teaching, and practice with some basic techniques. The goal is for you to have some basic principles and practice so that you are more comfortable in that first teaching role.

Saturday Jan 19, 9:00 – 9:45 and 9:50 – 10:35 am, ILC S220