The University Prize Instructorships have been a great opportunity for our graduate students to gain experience designing and teaching their own class, and a great opportunity for our undergraduates to engage in learning new areas with a great instructor. When the UPIs were put on hiatus during the pandemic, the Division of Science stepped in to keep this opportunity going for our community. We are really excited for the new courses that will be taught by Xin Yao Lin and Narges Iraji in the Spring 2022 semester- “Science versus Science Fiction” by Narges Iraji, and “Technology Use and Well-Being: Multidisciplinary Perspectives”.

Xin Yao Lin

I am very honored and delighted to receive the Divisional Prize Instructorship. I am currently a 5th-year psychology PhD student and I will be teaching a psychology course entitled “PSYC 55B: Technology Use and Well-Being: Multidisciplinary Perspectives” in the spring of 2022. The increase in technology use is changing how we connect, feel, and act. We are relying on technology more than ever, but whether the increased usage of technology is beneficial or detrimental to well-being has been controversial. Drawing on perspectives from psychology, neuroscience, computer-human interaction, and public health, this course explores the positive and negative impact of technology usage on our well-being across the lifespan. We will examine technology use in computer-mediated communication (e.g., smartphone, social media, internet, social apps), mHealth and telehealth, gaming, and other technology trends (e.g., Artificial intelligence, robots, virtual reality), and will explore how these technologies influence social life, adult development and aging, and health/health behavior (e.g., physical activity, diet, sleep).

I am very thankful for this opportunity provided by the Division of Science, and for my mentors and peers who have provided feedback and supported me along the way. I look forward to teaching this course and engaging students with how technology influences our social life, how we develop and age, and our health/health behavior.

Narges Iraji

The course Science and Science Fiction, designed for students with little to no science or math background, encourages conversations around science within the context of culture. Reading the works of science fiction by a diverse group of authors and discussing the science and imagination in them illuminates the inseparability of science from its human nature. I hope that this approach not only bridges the materials taught in class and the outside world but also sparks a curiosity that goes beyond the classroom.

Our inner urge to observe, decode patterns, and predict has existed well past the modern times and so has our passing of knowledge to the future in the form of storytelling. The combination of imagination and science is nothing new but the access to both, who can imagine and who can be a scientist, has changed throughout history. During the course, the students will read, discuss, and write about science fiction stories that inspire questions and problems which call for mathematical modeling. After becoming more familiar with some well-known mathematical models in areas such as population modeling and epidemiology, the students start working on a final project. They will formulate a question related to what they are passionate or curious about and pursue the answer using the tools that they have gained from the course. The goal is not to solve the problem, but to gain some insight into the steps required in doing so.

Teaching a University Prize Instructorship course has been a dream of mine since I heard about this opportunity in my first or second year. I am grateful for this, and thankful to all those who are helping me along the way. Numerous challenges follow developing a course, and while being one of the greatest projects that I have taken on, it has tested my patience a few times. I hope that after serving as a University Prize Instructorship instructor, I can help other graduate students who are interested in this opportunity by sharing some resources, such as information on inviting speakers or reserving classrooms with computers. My experience as a graduate student in physics and my research in the field of mathematical biology have truly led me to a new perspective. I now look around and find questions in all that I observe knowing someone else might have already started working on the answer. The course, Science and Science Fiction, encapsulates one of my attempts to pass this curiosity about the universe and life forward.