I am the co-founder of FLOW (Foreign Languages Offering Wellbeing), a collaboration between the Department of German Studies, the Student Wellness Center, and DCAL, which I initiated in response to increasing student anxiety and depression at Dartmouth in 2022. Since then, I have collected, created, and adapted wellbeing practices for my teaching and have co-led various workshops for faculty and students with external guests at Dartmouth.

Right now, I am transforming exercises from Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) from different countries into experiential learning moments for my language, film and culture classes. Here, I focus on human-tree relations in practices, performances, and stories for tourists and locals and examine the explicit and the unspoken rules of forests and nature parks in diverse cultures. I co-convene the University Seminar Private, Public and Planetary Wellbeing at Dartmouth with Sarah Crocket (Geisel) and Belinda Chiu (Tuck) and am excited to learn from diverse disciplines.

Hi! I'm Eugene and I teach Human-Centered Design (HCD) at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. In my courses, I try to bring a sense of fun and delight to my students' learning journeys, and facilitate their growth as creative collaborators through engaging, interactive hands-on projects.

I've been at Dartmouth since 2017, when I arrived to create the two-term capstone Senior Design Challenge course. It is a Social Impact Practicum (SIP) course in the Human-Centered Design Minor, and it was honored with the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching in 2018. I also teach the introductory Design Thinking course, as well as a new interdisciplinary course on Design Ethics (which is the only Engineering course at Dartmouth to satisfy the Traditions of Thought, Meaning, and Value (TMV) distributive requirement!)

I believe deeply in the importance of joy in education: when learning is fun, we learn better; and when teaching is fun, we teach better. A growing body of research shows that joy in learning environments and teaching practices is positively correlated to a large number of important learning outcomes, including focus, information retention, creativity, motivation, resilience in the face of failure, and much more. This is why I founded and direct the Joy Lab at Dartmouth, a research and design lab dedicated to making the case for the value of joy in higher ed, and to creating and disseminating effective teaching practices that enable educators to bring more joy into their teaching. Currently, I'm working with students in my lab to understand the barriers that prevent educators from making more room for joy, in an effort to help them overcome those barriers.

One teaching adventure that I had before jumping into higher ed involved turning an old delivery truck into a makerspace-on-wheels, and driving all around the US to teach elementary school students how to tinker, design, build, and grow their creative confidence.

When I'm not teaching, I'm probably either swimming, woodworking, or napping with my dog—the three activities that bring me the most joy.