My Teaching & Mentoring

I do not currently hold a formal teaching appointment, but my commitment to developing the next generation of researchers has not gone anywhere. I fulfill it through co-authoring with graduate students: research collaboration is my primary mode of teaching today. Teaching and research have always been synergistic for me, and co-authorship is where the two now meet, turning every project into a chance to train, coach, and learn alongside a student.

My teaching philosophy

I teach by doing. Rather than a lecture hall, my classroom is a shared research project, and students learn the craft the way it is actually practiced: framing a question, building and defending a method, wrangling data, writing and revising, and carrying a paper through peer review to publication. This apprenticeship model rests on the same principles that guided my classroom teaching:

• Communicate complex ideas intuitively and simply. I help students strip a problem down to its economic intuition before layering on technique, so they own the idea rather than memorize the method.
• Create room for students to self-construct knowledge. I give collaborators real responsibility on a project and let them work problems out, stepping in with questions rather than answers.
• Balance theory and application. Each project pairs a credible empirical method with a concrete policy or development question, which is what shapes strong young researchers for both academia and practice.
• Be available, with specific and constructive feedback. I keep regular contact and leave detailed, student-specific comments on drafts, code, and analysis, so quieter students have just as many ways to engage.
• Learn outside the classroom. The weekly research meetings I valued as a doctoral student are now the model for how I run collaborations: recurring, candid conversations about methods, framing, and the current research landscape.

The clearest measure of this approach is what comes out of it: co-authored briefs, articles, and ongoing projects in which a student moved from question to published output.

Current collaborations

Most of my mentoring happens through research collaboration, working shoulder-to-shoulder with graduate students. Recent and ongoing collaborations include:

• Festus Attah (Auburn University): co-authored a published article on gender gaps in wages and fringe benefits in Ghana, and is joining ARPC as an incoming Junior Agricultural Scholar to work closely with me on tracking U.S. agricultural risk and its impact on land prices.
• Walker Davis (Oklahoma State University): co-authored two ARPC briefs, Continued Pasture, Rangeland, and Forage (PRF) Insurance Expansion in 2026 and PRF Insurance Expansion and Emerging Limits to Growth, with ongoing work on PRF redesign and the impact of extreme heat on U.S. alfalfa.
• Evelyn Osei (Kansas State University): co-authored the ARPC brief Routine Pricing Adjustments Help Keep Crop Insurance Costs in Check and a published article on dietary shifts and off-farm work in Ghana.
• Sylvanus Gaku (Kansas State University): co-authored a published article on alternative farm safety-net program combinations.

Through okwaayeli, a GitHub platform for agricultural-productivity analysis in Ghana, I also mentor students on development-focused research:

• Gilbert Addae (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, iDiv Halle-Jena-Leipzig): ongoing work on the association between farmland ownership and crop production in Ghana.
• Benjamin Addo (University of Ghana): ongoing work on agricultural service delivery and smallholder farm performance in Ghana.

I also mentor junior co-authors and analysts at ARPC across the Center’s briefs, reports, and software; see my leadership for more.

Classroom teaching experience

My approach to mentoring grew out of earlier classroom teaching, which remains the foundation for how I work with students today:

• Instructor, AGEC 115: Decision Tools for Agricultural Economics & Agribusiness (Fall 2020), Kansas State University. Students learn to model problems with spreadsheets to find answers for decision-makers and stakeholders. The class was mostly freshmen (54%) and sophomores (36%).
• Teaching assistant for four undergraduate courses at the University of Arkansas: AGEC 2403: Quantitative Tools for Agribusiness (Dr. Qiuqiong Huang, Spring 2014); AGEC 4323: Agri-Business Entrepreneurship (Dr. Daniel V. Rainey, Spring 2014); AGEC 4313: Agricultural Business Management (Dr. Michael P. Popp, Fall 2013); and AGEC 4163: Agricultural and Rural Development (Dr. Lawton Lanier Nalley, Fall 2013).
• Guest lectures at the University of Arkansas: describing data for AGEC 2403 (Spring 2014); difference-in-differences estimation for the graduate-level AGEC 5613: Econometrics I (Spring 2015); and development-economics topics across multiple offerings of AGEC 4163 (2013–2015).

In the classroom I anchored every concept in everyday student experience. In AGEC 115, for instance, I introduced each spreadsheet tool only after covering its underlying economics (opportunity cost, the time value of money, elasticities, market clearing, break-even), and framed a poor grade from skipping an assignment as the opportunity cost of going out on the due date, relating abstract ideas to students’ own lives.

Teaching interests and availability

My strengths lie in applying quantitative methods and economic models to real-world problems. I am well suited to undergraduate courses on farm-, firm-, and industry-level agricultural issues in the U.S. and the developing world, and to graduate courses on the practical application of empirical methods, with particular depth in econometrics, big data, and geospatial techniques. While I focus on co-authorship today, I welcome guest lectures, student mentoring, and future teaching opportunities.

Interested in co-authoring, mentoring, or a guest lecture? Email me.