Co-Instructor

STA 119FS: Statistics as a Way of Thinking: History, Ideas, and Evidence

Fall 2026 – Duke University, Department of Statistical Science

Co-taught with Alexander Volfovsky.

• Co-created a first-year seminar that teaches statistical reasoning through its own history, reading Stephen M. Stigler’s The History of Statistics with 16 first-semester students around a discussion table.
• Designed the course as a general-education entry point to quantitative work, for students who do not arrive thinking of themselves as quantitative and who bring no prior programming experience.
• Built weekly labs in which students learn R by reconstructing the historical analyses they have just read, working from the original data toward reproducible reports of their own.
• Built AI literacy into the course, giving roughly ten minutes of each lab to responsible practices, ethical questions, and the assumptions behind the answers these tools produce.