Madeleine

Certified Tutor

I am a researcher with a PhD in Physical Chemistry from MIT and years of experience teaching chemistry and biology. I taught a recitation and led classroom demos and exam reviews for two semesters of MIT's notoriously challenging general chemistry course, 5.111. I made the material accessible to everyone, including by teaching math concepts that were germane to the expression of chemistry, constructing visual aids, and giving problems and solutions. I won a teaching award for my work on the general chemistry course. I then tutored for several years at MIT's homework resource center, the Talented Scholars Resource Room. There, I helped students gain the confidence to drive their learning and confront new problems in biology, chemistry and calculus.

I am a biologist as well as a chemist; I did my bachelor's degree in biochemistry, studied microbial control of transcription in my undergraduate thesis, and then in my PhD I applied the methods of physical chemistry to questions of viral entry and exit from cells. I like to explain things from a physical perspective - based on the movements of atoms and charges.

After all these years, whenever I'm learning or teaching, I still follow the advice from my high school AP Biology teacher: "Memorize to Forget; Understand to Remember." I help you understand the concepts so you can not only solve new problems on tests, but apply what you learned in the "real world" as well.

In my spare time, I like reading science fiction novels, hiking in nature, and going to zoos and anywhere I can interact with wildlife.