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Teaching and Service Jeffrey Meier

Teaching at Western

Teaching at UGA

Directed Reading Programs

In the fall of 2017, I created a Directed Reading Program (DRP) in the UGA Math Department. This program pairs enthusiastic undergraduate math students with graduate student mentors in semester-long learning partnerships. Graduate students gain mentoring experience, and undergraduate participants have the opportunity to learn interesting math that would normally fall outside the department curriculum. The UGA Math Department DRP was supported by NSF grant: FRG: Trisections - New Directions in Low-Dimensional Topology.

Before coming to UGA, I was involved with DRPs at Indiana University and UT Austin. In the fall of 2015, fellow postdoc Corrin Clarkson and I started a DRP for the IU math department. As a graduate student, I was a mentor in the UT Mathematics Department's DRP. Over two years, I worked with three different students who completed readings in low-dimensional topology, knot theory, and algebraic topology.

Inquiry Based Learning and Flipped Classrooms

As an educator, I work to utilize effective teaching techniques and pedagogy. For example, as a postdoc at Indiana University, I taught two upper division math courses to pre-service K-12 teachers using the guided inquiry method, which I was first exposed to as a teaching assistant for Michael Starbird at UT Austin. At UGA, I have implemented a flipped classroom when teaching Precalculus. For more details about my philosophy regarding teaching and mathematics education, please see my Teaching Statement.

Undergraduate Mentoring

In the summer of 2018, I designed a mini-course on graph theory for the University of Georgia MathCamp, a summer math program for Georgia high school students hosted at the University of Georgia.

In the summers of 2015 and 2016, I participated as a mentor in the IU Research Experience for Undergraduates, supervising a project relating the braid group to the study of knotted surfaces in four-space via bridge trisections and a project concerned with constructing irreducible knotted Klein bottles in four-space.

In the summer of 2016, I participated in the Indiana University Minority Serving Institutions STEM Initiative, which is a partnership between IU and a collection of Historically Black Colleges and Universities aimed at increasing the number of African American graduate students, scholars, and professionals in the STEM disciplines.

I also participated in UT Austin's Intellectual Entrepreneurship Pre-Graduate School Internship program (IE). This program is similar to the DRP, but is university-wide and targets underrepresented minorities and first-generation college students to increase graduate school awareness and preparation.

Conferences

In April 2018, I co-organized an AMS Sectional Meeting Special Session on Trisections at Northeastern University, in Boston, MA.

In February 2018, I organized the first Winter Trisectors Meeting, which took place at the University of Georgia, in Athens, GA.

I was a co-organizer for the Trisections and Low-Dimensional Topology, which took place at the American Institute of Mathematics, in San Jose, CA in March 2017.

I was a co-organizer for the Conference on 4-manifolds and knot concordance, which took place at the Max Plank Institute in Bonn, Germany in October 2016.

I was a co-organizer for the 12th edition of the Graduate Student Topology and Geometry Conference, which took place at UT Austin in February 2014.

In February 2013, I co-organized the first annual Texas Topology and Geometry (TexTAG) Undergraduate Conference.

Talks