Awards & Honours
- University Medal, University of Sydney — awarded for outstanding performance in Honours research (2025).
- Eta Kappa Nu Lambda Chapter, University of Pennsylvania (2023)
- Summer Research Scholarship, University of Sydney (2023).
Research Experience
PhD Candidate, University of Sydney (2025–current)
- Supervised by Dr Jonathan Kummerfeld and Dr Elliot Varoy (University of Sydney).
- Additional collaborators on other projects:
- Muddy Card Project: Dr. Elena Glassman (Harvard University)
- Feedback Proejct: Dr. Hamish Fernando, Dr. Mohammed Polash, Mr. Jose Meza, and Mr. Sasha Cohen.
- Research focused on natural language processing for educational feedback, with particular emphasis on scaling active learning practices and improving teacher feedback at large class sizes.
- Detailed information on current projects is available on the home page and portfolio.
Honours Thesis — NLP for Education (2024)
- Conducted research into NLP techniques to streamline the analysis of student “muddy card” responses for educators, under the supervision of Dr Jonathan Kummerfeld.
- Awarded the University Medal for thesis outcomes. Research continues to be expanded as the foundation of current PhD work.
Research Assistant – Natural Language Processing (2025)
- Research assistant for Dr Jonathan Kummerfeld.
- Worked on the Diplomacy project (funded by DARPA), developing methods to evaluate AI bots.
- After this, I did annotation work and analysis for a new data visualisation benchmark. This project is currently under review at an A* venue.
Mental Health in Australian Youth (2025–26)
- Collaborated with Dr Richard Morris, examining trends in psychological distress among Australian youth.
- Contributed a digital report focused on trend analysis, designed to be interpretable by a broad audience.
- Published as part of the Life Course Centre Working Paper Series.
Math Lecture Attendance and Student Value Decisions (2025 – )
- Research assistant for Dr Rosie Cameron.
- Completing a project to understand what resources students use in first-year mathematics education, and why they choose not to attend lectures.
- In-review submission (as first-author) to a domestic education conference to present preliminary findings.
Chemistry Education Research (2021–22)
- Conducted semi-structured interviews and analysed quiz completion data under the supervision of Dr Stephen George-Williams and Dr Reyne Pullen, exploring the impact of pre-lecture quizzes on student learning. Findings published as joint first author in the International Journal of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education. [Report]
- Developed the CLEVR Molecule Generator, a paid research project to enable quick generation of 3D molecules in the Unity development environment. Presented at an NSW teachers’ conference.
- Ongoing member of the Chemistry Education Research theme meetings (2023–), collaborating across faculties.
Student Partner (2023 – )
- Invited delegate at the 2023 Student as Partners roundtable at the University of Sydney (~100 delegates). Discussions informed the university’s Student as Partners Charter.
- Acted as a student-partner research assistant on multiple education-focused projects across the Faculty of Science, including:
- A study investigating high failure rates in first-year units, involving student interviews, mental health training, and active participation in meetings with unit coordinators.
- A focus group study examining student perceptions of a newly designed group-work component in a sport science unit.
- A literature review on the use of AI in allied health practice and education.
- Invited to join a team led by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor to discuss the university’s approach to AI in assessments.
Teaching Experience
Lecturer — Introductory Statistics (2024, 2026)
- Lecturer for the Intensive January offering of MATH1005 at the University of Sydney. Responsibilities included composing assignments and the final exam, and grading assessment tasks. [Unit outline]
- Lecturer for the statistics component of MATH1062, for the summer school offering. Overall student unit of survey result of 4.32/5.
Tutor & Demonstrator University of Sydney — (2022–current)
Developed a tutorial resources website to support students with materials after class. “Tutor” in Australia is equivalent to “teaching assistant” in the US.)
Tutor for various units in the School of Mathematics and Statistics:
- DATA1001: Introduction to Data Science (2022 demonstrator, 2023 – 2024, 2026)
- DATA1901: Introduction to Data Science (Advanced) (2024)
- MATH1005: Statistical Thinking with Data (2023 – 2024, 2026)
- DATA3888: Data Science Capstone (2024, 2026 W1 & 12-13)
- MATH1062: Mathematics 1B (2024 – 2026)
- STAT5002: Introduction to Statistics (2025)
Tutor for various units in the School of Computer Science:
- COMP4446/5046: Natural Language Processing (2026)
- INFO4994: AI Literacy and Competency (2026)
- INFO1113: Object-Oriented Programming (2026)
Tutor in the United States Study Centre:
- DATA4207/5207: Data Analysis in the Social Sciences (2025)
Teaching Assistant — CIT5950 Computer Systems Programming (2023)
- Teaching assistant for a core course in the Master of Computer and Information Technology programme at the University of Pennsylvania. The course introduces fundamental concepts in computing systems using advanced techniques in C. [Course description]
Teaching Assistant — Moneyball Academy, Wharton (2023)
- TA for the Wharton Sports Analytics Business Initiative’s flagship Moneyball Academy programme, introducing high school students to statistics and the R programming language.
Other Teaching Roles
- The King’s School, Sydney — boarding patron supporting students aged 13–18, including homework support and pastoral care (2020–21, 2023–current); library tutoring for Years 7–12 (2020–22); plus the Gowan Brae Guardian programme and software development tutoring.
- Private Academic Tutor (2020–current) — tutored students one-on-one across mathematics, English, and study skills such as organisation and time management.
Invited Talks
- INFO4994 AI Literacy and Competency Guest Lecture: Model Training [link]
- ALTA 2025: Teaching NLP/Using NLP for Teaching” (Speakers: Massimo Piccardi, Jey Han Lau, Thomas Elton, Moderator: Aditya Joshi) [link] (2025)
- Science Fail rates, Large Community of Practice Event, Muddy Card Clustering: An AI Approach to Understanding USS Responses (2024)
- Stage 6 Conference 2022: a Deep Dive Into ST6 Pedagogy, How can we utilise digital 3D modelling tools to support the development of chemistry students? (2022)
- Science Educators Community of Practice (University of Sydney), Sharing experience between an early casual teaching fellow and an experienced casual teaching fellow – Thomas James Elton (Mathematics), Anthony Chetcuti (Chemistry). (2022)
- Science Educators Community of Practice (University of Sydney), Panel Discussion: Unearthing the collective wisdom of our casual teaching staff. (2022)
Software & Other Outputs
- CLEVR Molecule Generator — An easy-to-use scripting language for the quick generation of ball-and-stick molecule representations in Unity, developed to support chemistry education. [Documentation] [GitHub]
- Hypothesis Tests Visualised (HPTV) — An interactive project facilitating active learning tasks to help students understand conceptually challenging topics in statistics. [Project]
- Teaching Resources Website — An online resource designed to support students after tutorials and labs. [Site]
Industry Experience
- SiteSee (2023) — Short-term internship (6 weeks) working on object detection AI for a company that builds digital twins of cellular towers.
- Morton Real Estate (2019–22) — Data cleaning to support migration to new database software; advised on data science integrations. Earlier clerical and reception roles.