About Me

I have a rich and extensive teaching history, including many years of high school-, polytechnic-, university-, and post-graduate-level teaching experience. This includes my years as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Alberta, Canada, and as a Scientific Officer in Singapore. I can also point to my time as an instructor for Kaplan Certified Education Provider in Tokyo, Japan, where I taught classroom and private sessions in SSAT, SAT, American College Testing (ACT), GMAT, GRE, and TOEFL preparation. These and other teaching experiences have helped me become an adept and very effective instructor. I truly enjoy teaching and this has come across clearly in both larger classroom settings and in one-to-one sessions. It might surprise many that I have been teaching, in one form or another, since I attended what would be the equivalent of junior high school. During those junior high school years, my family was undergoing some economic hardships and I became a private tutor for several younger students as a means to improve our domestic situation. It was then that I first recognized that I was good at teaching others, and further, that I enjoyed it. When I was concomitantly but separately completing two distinct undergraduate programs, in Biochemistry and Zoology, at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and later, a graduate program in the Department of Zoology at the University of Alberta in Canada, I became a teaching assistant and, in this role, was exposed to teaching, in an official, professional capacity, at the university level. During this period, I confirmed what I'd learned earlier: that I was very proficient at the whole business of teaching, and also that I very much enjoyed it. Over the intervening years, I have had the opportunity to teach in many different situations and settings involving a variegated assortment of teaching companies and institutes, and students of all ages and needs. Hence, I've trained adult students taking courses as disparate as Business Mathematics and Engineering Physics, and also those preparing for standardized tests such as TOEFL, GMAT, and GRE, as well as Biomedical, Biotechnical, and Public Health professionals. In addition to the undergraduate university students alluded to above, I have also had the opportunity to train students attending various Polytechnics. Finally, I have had a lot of experience teaching various cohorts of elementary, junior high school, and high school students, primarily on SSAT, SAT, and ACT preparation. I am extremely qualified to teach Biology at many different levels. For example, with two master's degrees in different Biology disciplines, I possess a very comprehensive repertoire and background of academic, research and professional expertise strongly anchored in various disciplines of Biology and Public Health. This has necessarily afforded me a great deal of knowledge of, and familiarity with, many aspects of the Life Sciences, including the Biomolecular Sciences, Molecular Medicine, Transfusion Medicine, Hematology, Serology, Immunology, Anatomy, Physiology, Marine Biology, Zoology, Ecology, and Environmental Sciences. I am familiar with the curriculum and assessment requirements of biology concepts across all school levels. Moreover, as part of my graduate program in Zoology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, I taught a variety of university laboratory courses in Introductory Biology, Zoology, and Anatomy. Students taking these courses were in the first, second, and third years of their respective undergraduate programs. The teaching responsibilities included creating, organizing, running, and grading all tests and final laboratory examinations. I was also called upon to grade essays, reports, and final lecture examinations. Ms. Maggie Haag was the coordinator of senior zoology courses at the University of Alberta during this period. I have included, in my resume, an assessment, by Ms. Haag, of my teaching performance, which is representative of my teaching ability for all of the courses mentioned above. During my tenure in Singapore, I worked for nearly six years as a Scientific Officer in the Centre For Transfusion Medicine one of several governmental health departments that, at the time comprised the Health Sciences Authority (HSA), a multidisciplinary scientific and regulatory collective bringing together a multiplicity of expertise from medical and scientific professionals. What is most relevant for our purposes here is that I designed, developed, and managed several in-house and external training programs on various aspects of hematology, transfusion medicine, and biotechnology. The external programs were primarily for Singapore Polytechnic and Temasek Polytechnic students but lecturers from the Temasek Polytechnic Biotechnology program as well as from the Nursing program in Nanyang Polytechnic were sometimes enrolled for training as well. Please find, embedded within my resume, an employment letter from the HSA indicating that I enjoyed teaching, which represented a relatively significant part of my responsibilities as a Scientific Officer. While in Singapore, I married a Japanese national and eventually resigned from the Scientific Officer position to join my wife in Japan, where I began working at the RIKEN-Brain Science Institute (RIKEN-BSI). My main responsibilities at RIKEN-BSI were research-oriented, and my investigative efforts were very fruitful. I produced two first-author publications detailing genetic and biochemical research on several types of epilepsy, co-authored a research paper on ataxia, registered a scientific patent, and completed numerous collaborative efforts, all in less than four years. During this period, I applied for Permanent Residency (PR) in Canada and was advised that I would have to be ready to arrive in Canada on very short notice. Because this strict requirement created too much uncertainty around timelines that would have severely impacted the types of international collaborative research I was undertaking, I decided, after nearly four years of cutting-edge scientific investigation at RIKEN-BSI, to resign from my position and find other employment on an informal, ad hoc basis until my PR application process was completed. Consequently, I began working as an instructor for Kaplan Certified Education Provider in Tokyo. At Kaplan, my very strong teaching skills and abilities were quickly recognized, including in the form of sterling student appraisals, and I then became the primary SAT and GMAT instructor at the firm. I was also often called upon to teach private sessions in SAT II Subjects (eg. Math II level), and, less frequently, in SSAT, GRE, TOEFL, and ACT preparation. The SAT classrooms included not only Japanese students preparing for applications to North American and European universities but also very large numbers of children of expatriates, particularly Americans and Canadians, living and working in Tokyo. Most of these students were applying for prestigious schools on the Eastern and Western coasts of North America, which, at that time, required high SAT scores for admittance. In addition to teaching large classrooms for the SAT, I also conducted one-on-one sessions with students requiring specific attention and assistance, whether it was for quantitative, English, reading comprehension, or writing aspects of the SAT. Because I have complete, expert fluency in the English language, including an exceptionally high level of writing ability, I have also had many years of experience training students and scientific colleagues on the standard approaches to effective writing, as well as in the more nuanced aspects of writing in various formats and levels. My writing ability has figured prominently in the pursuit of my extensive academic qualifications, as well as in all my professional activities, including my many years of professional experience as a freelance writer, editor, rewriter, proofreader, and ghostwriter. For example, I worked with RIKEN, on a freelance basis, as a scientific writer, for the RIKEN Public Relations Office, before organizational changes and attendant budgetary cuts altered the situation. Ms. Saeko Okada headed the program, and her testimonial can be found in my resume. My comprehensive writing experience has encompassed not only writing, editing, and rewriting scientific, technical, and academic materials, but also a wide variety of other forms of English composition. Whatever distinct domain such written materials occupied, or whatever purpose they served, the quality of all such renderings has always been greatly augmented by my deep understanding of the conventions of formal written English, and English grammar rules. As a published researcher who is very familiar with the AMA style, and who has worked closely and cooperatively with numerous colleagues on many scientific manuscripts, including as a rewriter, editor, and proofreader, I understand the vital need to craft research articles that effectively, clearly, and consistently communicate the specific scientific findings at play, all while ensuring that the particular and peculiar nuances of the research field and the central message and voice of the authors are retained. As a scientist privy to large bodies of important knowledge, I also feel very strongly that I must endeavor to engage with the wider public and community and make constant contributions to societal well-being. To this end, I have been providing voluntary scientific feedback to the Canadian Federal and British Columbia Provincial governments on changes to environmental laws and regulations, assessments of large natural resource extractive projects, etc. I have also been spending considerable time, effort, and energy, volunteering as an expert external reviewer for the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a sister grouping to the better known as IPCC. The IPBES prepares regular summary policy reports and assessments to advise the UN and the world's governments on the dangers we face from the loss of natural ecosystems and what we can do to minimize our collective risks. From my many years of experience teaching students, of all backgrounds, in a variety of subjects, I know firsthand just how important it is to have the requisite talent and passion for teaching. I believe that the combination of experience, skills, and energy I have always brought to my teaching activities has served me very well, and I have been deeply gratified by the overwhelmingly positive feedback I have received from my students everywhere.

Education & Certifications

Tutoring Subjects