Teaching Stellina Ao

Teaching

BE 177A: Bioengineering Capstone Design I (Autumn 2025)

Undergraduate Course, UCLA, Bioengineering, 1900

As the teaching assistant for the computational track in the Bioengineering senior capstone, I was responsible for guiding four teams of five students as they ideated and built virtual cell models (e.g., predicting growth rates given drugs, transcriptional changes given CRISPRi KOs, etc.). I held weekly, two-hour office hours where I taught relevant concepts, suggested concrete packages and workflows, debugged code, and helped with interpretation. I also provided dense and specific feedback on practice presentations and proposals, focusing on honing scientific communication, grasp of core concepts, and the degree of creative innovation in each project.

BE 175: Machine Learning and Data-Driven Modeling in Bioengineering (Spring 2025 & Spring 2026)

Undergraduate Course, UCLA, Bioengineering, 1900

As a teaching assistant for BE 175, I led twenty students in weekly two-hour discussions, reinforcing and extending core lecture content. I focused on drilling the high-level intuition for machine learning techniques that my students may encounter in their careers as bioengineers, from dynamical systems to Bayesian inference. I also prioritized conditioning good practices and grooves of skepticism such that, even if they don’t understand the mathematics of a model they encounter in the workforce, they know how to probe and question it (i.e., always cross-validate!). Still, I liked to cover the mathematics underlying the techniques whenever time permitted and the math was cool.