Teaching

I enjoy teaching and mentoring students, from freshman-level service courses to more advanced graduate courses. I learn from teaching as much as my students learn from my courses. Teaching forces me to present non-trivial problems in a pedagogical way, and offers me a new point-of-view on these problems. Sometimes the questions that the students ask give me answers to my own questions. Sometimes, students propose an alternate way to solve a given problem, which can be simpler than the solution I found. I believe that teaching is a symbiosis between the teacher and the students.

In France, where I got all my college degrees, there exists a degree called DEA that has no equivalent in the USA. Getting this degree is mandatory for being allowed to start a doctorate. When I obtained my DEA degree, my ranking entitled me to two awards:

• A financial support for my doctorate.
• The authorization and training courses from the CIES (Center for initiation to higher education) of Nice for being officially an instructor.

My teaching activities started at the beginning of my doctorate.

I spend a lot of personal time in preparing my courses, in order to make sure that the students can easily understand all the covered topics. I often create 3D animations using ray-tracing techniques in order to illustrate a given situation. For example, I created a video in order to illustrate how superfluidity is experimentally detected and how a thought experiment can be designed in order to derive a formula for calculating the superfluid density. My video was selected to appear in the video gallery of the APS March Meeting 2015, where I was invited to give a talk on the subject. The video is directly accessible here:

I like to challenge the students to think like real Physicists. Indeed, many problems found in the literature are often solved by self-consistency, starting from the known solution and showing that “it works”. But I think this is not a good way to learn, because a real Physicist who is facing a new problem does not know the solution in advance. He or she has to investigate the problem in order to find the solution. So I like to present problems as they appeared to people who solved them for the first time, in order to train the students to elaborate their own discovery of the solution.

It is also important to draw connections with the historical framework in which the physical concepts were developed. New ideas were not always accepted by the scientific community, but they imposed themselves by the facts: They reconciled the theory with the observation.

Motivating the students

Physics is fun, and so is Math. If we can convince the students that this is true, then they learn better. This is why I always try to make connections between the topics of my courses and our everyday life, with direct examples of application. For example, in order to illustrate my “electronics” course, I designed and built a 16-band audio spectrum analyzer (see the full project here). My students were able to fully understand how it works and build their own. The video below shows a test of this spectrum analyzer:

In order to illustrate group theory and non-commutative algebra, I took the example of the Rubik's cube. I explained the students how commutators can be used in order to derive formulas that allow one to solve the six faces of the cube, and composed a homework assignment in which the students are guided step-by-step through the final solution starting from a randomly shuffled cube. No need to mention that the students were very excited about this. I also made a series of videos to explain the method:

Mentoring graduate and undergraduate students

I have always been actively involved in mentoring students since the beginning of my postdoctoral activities. I discussed with the students about physics problems, computer codes, and helped them to publish their scientific results. Among them:

• Miriam Huntley was an undergraduate REU (Research Experience for Undergraduate) student who visited the University of California (Davis) for the summer. Our collaboration led to a well-cited publication (Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 116405 (2008)).
• Marta Wolack was a graduate student at the Centre for Quantum Technologies of the National University of Singapore. She visited the Institut Non-Linéaire de Nice in France where I obtained my PhD, and our collaboration led to three publications:
  • Europhys. Lett. 86, 47006 (2009)
  • Phys. Rev. A. 82, 013614 (2010)
  • Computer Physics Communications, doi:10.1016/j.cpc.2010.12.032
• Andrew Baldwin was a graduate student at the University of California (Davis). He developed strong computational skills through his work with me, and our collaboration led to a publication (Phys. Rev. A 78, 033619 (2008)).
• Alexander Zujev was a graduate student at the University of California (Davis). He is currently doing a postdoc at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and our collaboration led to a publication (Phys. Rev. A 78, 033619 (2008)).
• Christopher Varney was a graduate student at the University of California (Davis). He joined in August 2013 the Physics Department at the University of West Florida. Our collaboration led to a publication (Phys. Rev. A 78, 033619 (2008)).
• Laurent de Forges de Parny was a graduate student at the Institut Non-Linéaire de Nice in France where I obtained my PhD. He is currently a postdoc researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Our collaboration led to five publications:
  • Phys. Rev. A 82, 063602 (2010)
  • Phys. Rev. B 84, 064529 (2011)
  • Eur. Phys. J. B. (2012) 85:169
  • Phys. Rev. B 88, 104509 (2013)
  • Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 195302 (2015)

Teaching experience

• At Xavier University
• Fall 2023: General Physics I.
• Spring 2024: General Physics II.
• At Loyola University
• Fall 2018: Introduction to Waves and Quantum Physics.
• Fall 2018: General Chemistry.
• Fall 2017: Introduction to Neural Networks & Applications.
• Fall 2016 - 2018: Physics for Life Sciences I.
• Fall 2016 - 2018: Classical Mechanics.
• Spring 2017: Introduction to Physics and Engineering.
• Spring 2017: Physics for Life Sciences II.
• Spring 2017 - 2018: Electromagnetism.
• Spring 2018: Introduction to Thermal Physics.
• Summer 2018: Physics for Life Sciences I.
• At the College of Wooster
• Supervising senior students for their Independent Study (IS) projects.
• Spring 2016: Modern Optics.
• Spring 2016: Math Methods.
• Fall 2015: Calculus Physics.
• Fall 2015: Electronics.
• At Louisiana State University
• 2012 – 2015: C++ programming language.
• 2009 – 2013: Mentor of a PhD student, Kalani Hettiarachchilage. Kalani made an intensive use of the Stochastic Green Function (SGF) algorithm, a quantum Monte Carlo method that I developed, in order to study various lattice Hamiltonians. This led to the first publication of Kalani.
• At University of Leiden (The Netherlands)
• Fall 2008: Quantum Theory.
• Fall 2007: Quantum Theory.
• Fall 2006: Quantum Theory.
• At University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis (France)
• Spring 2004: Theory of Probability.
• Fall 2003: Mathematics applied to Physics.
• Spring 2003: Unix Systems and C Programming Language.
• Fall 2002: Classical Mechanics.
• Spring 2002: Unix Systems and C Programming Language.
• Fall 2001: Classical Mechanics.

Outreach activities

• April 2011: NanoDays at Louisiana Arts and Science Museum. LA-SiGMA (Louisiana Alliance for Simulation-Guided Materials Applications) faculty and graduate students from Louisiana State University participated in the Baton Rouge area's NanoDays events. NanoDays is a nationwide festival celebrating the science of ultra matter. LA-SiGMA faculty members gave lectures and graduate students led demonstrations to 288 guests at the Louisiana Arts and Science Museum.
• November 2004: Mentor at Rio Linda Junior High School in Sacramento (California) for "economically disadvantaged children". I was in a group of postdoc researchers from the University of California (Davis) who were invited to give a demonstration of quantum levitation using high-temperature superconductors, under the supervision of Pr. Richard Scalettar.
• September 2001: Instructor at the annual Science Festival in Nice (France).