Benjamin Marlin

Professor
 
Phone: (413) 545-4493
A355 LGRC

Training and Outreach

In additional to classroom teaching, I have greatly enjoyed participating in community educational outreach for middle and high school students as well as training institutes for postdocs and university faculty. A few details and materials related to these activities can be found below.

Training

From 2017 to 2021 I served as a core faculty member for the NIH-sponsored mobile health training institute (mHTI). mHTI is a team science focused, one-week intensive summer program that provides interdisciplinary training in mobile health research methods and approaches. I lectured in machine learning for mobile health and mentored project groups with my colleagues Bonnie Spring and Donna Metz as part of my work with mHTI. My last in-person talk for mHTI is available here. Information on applying to join mHTI as a scholar can be found here.

In Summer 2023, I will be lecturing on machine learning in the UT Austin T32 Precision Health Methodology Summer Boot Camp.

Outreach

From 2013 to 2016 I coordinated programming activities for the UMass Amherst Women in Engineering and Computing Career Day that were attended by 50-100 high school students per year. I developed custom activities using MIT Scratch for this event, similar to many current hour of code activities. This event was staffed by many great grad and undergrad student volunteers from UMass Computer Science over the years.

From 2014 to 2019 I also led a week long summer workshop, An Introduction to Creative Computing,  as part of the UMass Amherst and Girls Inc Eureka! Program. This workshop was partly funded as an educational component of my NSF career award and served 10-20 middle school girls each summer. Participating in Eureka! was a great experience both for me and for the many grad student volunteers from UMass Computer Science that participated over the years. An article on the first offering of the workshop is available here. Some of the projects developed by the participants are available at the links below.