Zvi N. Roth

Zvi N. Roth

using fMRI, eye-tracking, and modeling to study brain representations

Teaching

Cognitive Processes A, graduate course (2012-2014)

Modified course and delivered lectures, ELSC, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2012

This was the first course I ever taught. I was notified a month before the beginning of the school year that I would be teaching this course. I was officially the teaching assistant (TA), but as was the custom at ELSC at the time I taught the entire course, wrote the final exam and graded the students. I was pretty nervous, not only because this would be the first class I would teach, but also because it was on a topic in which I had limited experience. The aim of the course was to give students coming from non-cognitive backgrounds an overview of cognitive psychology, with a slight emphasis on cognitive models. Topics included perception, attention, problem solving, and memory. The following month consisted of extensive article reading. Every few days I would meet with Prof. Anat Maril, who supervised the course, to discuss the literature and the PowerPoint presentations I was making. The end result was a success, and the course received very positive feedback.

Data Structures, undergraduate course (2012-2013)

Delivered review lectures, Azrieli College of Engineering, 2012

In 2012 I taught as a TA in a computer engineering course on data structures, at Azrieli College of Engineering. During the first semester I gave one lesson a week, and during the second semester I gave three lessons a week. The lessons were on the same material, but for different groups of students. Teaching at the college was a very different experience from teaching at ELSC. The course was mainly for first year students, who were still becoming accustomed to academic studies. Many of the students showed minimal interest in the lesson, and I tried many times to nudge them to participate, ask questions, or answer my questions to them. Each lesson centered around a small number of data structures or algorithms, including heaps, stacks, queues, binary & AVL trees, hash tables, sets, maps, and several sort algorithms. In the presentation I tried to demonstrate the algorithms in a clear way. The slides were neat and simple. I would go step by step through how an algorithm would run on toy data. My goal was that even if the students didn’t remember all the details of the algorithm, they would still have a clear intuition of what the algorithm does, when it works, and in what situations it is efficient.

Uncovering principles of human vision using fMRI, graduate course (2015-2016)

Initiated and built course and delivered lectures, ELSC, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2015

After teaching for two years at ELSC, I decided to create a new course that focused on my own field of research. The course covered the basics of MRI and hemodynamics, different fMRI experimental designs, various methods to analyze fMRI data, the neural basis of BOLD, and the principles of visual cortex that fMRI has been able to reveal. I taught this course for the next 2 years, right until I left for my postdoc. During the course I got to meet students from many other labs at Hebrew University, and some long-lasting relationships were created.