Teaching

My teaching and mentoring philosophy are based on mutual respect, recognition, and learning. During my lectures, I emphasize applied examples to motivate additional questions and invite students to revaluate methods' validity and generalizations under specific contexts. With my research assistants, I engage in mutual learning adventures and projects, recognizing the importance of those experiences for their and my career and personal development, in and outside academia.    

At Columbia, I recently taught the course Economics of Sustainability for the M.Sc. in Sustainability Management program. I also served twice as lead instructor for Cornell graduate student consultancy groups or SMART (Student Multidisciplinary Applied Research Team) that, under my supervision, worked on the field with smallholders' organizations. Besides, at Cornell, I served as a teacher assistant (TA) for the undergraduate course in Resource Economics with Pr. Jon Conrad. During my master's at the University of Pittsburgh Pr. Sera Linardi, identified my passion for teaching, and invited me to become a teacher assistant for graduate courses in Quantitative Methods II and Game Theory. 

Outside the US, and while working at the Central Bank of Colombia, I served as Adjunct Professor for the top economic departments in the country. I taught Introduction to Economics, Macroeconomics, and Colombian Economic Policy; this last course, along with senior policymakers in the country. My students recognize me as someone approachable and open to questions.

teaching 2
Courses
Description

This graduate course of the Economics of Sustainability Management builds on core economics courses to address issues of environmental, resource, and ecological economics. By the end of the semester, it is expected that students will gain experience using economic concepts to recommend or critique actual sustainability management policies and decisions. An important goal of the class is to have students work in groups to apply economic concepts to current public policy issues that will require coordination with governments, civil society, the scientific community, and business. Students not only learn economic concepts, but they will also learn how to explain them to decision-makers. The course will cover concepts and metrics from microeconomic theory, game theory, information economics, and risk management.

Description

The course concerned with the optimal use of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources. Simple dynamic models were developed for fisheries, forests, fossil fuels, and stock pollutants. The Method of Lagrange Multipliers was used to identify conditions for optimal allocation over time. Emphasis was placed on the economic intuition behind the optimality conditions and Excel was used to solve numerical examples. I was TA for this undergraduate course taught and designed by Pr. Jon Conrad.

Note
Textbook: Resource Economics by Jon M. Conrad
Description

This course complements the Student Multidisciplinary Applied Research Team (SMART) Program. The goal of the course is to offer students a unique learning and service team experience, working with entrepreneurs, NGOs, universities, and public agencies in emerging markets and economically disadvantaged communities. The field study component involves interaction with various companies, public offices, civic groups and other stakeholders that are related to the project. During the semester, students analyze the information and write up reports and case studies for the clients.

Note
Lead instructor for Colombia team in 2015 and 2016
Syllabus
Description

An incentive is a factor that motivates behavior, such as the expectation of a reward or the fear of punishment. As humans, we all devise strategies (or plans of action) in response to perceived incentives. Sometimes the success of these plans depends only on our own skill or effort. More often, however, our chance to secure rewards or avoid punishments depends on our interaction with others human beings who are motivated by their own set of (possibly similar) incentives. Game theory provides the tools to analyze this interactive process of strategic thinking, and behavioral economics provides a unifying framework to understand deviations from this process.

Note
I was TA for this course designed and lecturer by Pr. Sera Linardi
Description

The randomized testing of social policy is now a global phenomenon, influencing decision makers in international development, domestic social policy, and political/ corporate strategy. In this course we effectively used statistical software to explore data, find relationships between variables, form hypotheses about causality, and test them.

Note
I was TA for this course designed and lecturer by Pr. Sera Linardi
Syllabus