Meena will be teaching PB130 and PB230. She will be guiding PBS student researchers and supporting them with their research projects. Meena achieved her PhD from the University of Cambridge in January 2022. This multi-mixed methods research was inspired by her passion to help students tackle mathematics anxiety, which is known to be prevalent among university students irrespective of their academic abilities, and to adversely impact their performance as well as future careers. This is an important theme considering that statistics and research methods courses are core components of almost all degree programmes and entail mathematical knowledge and its applications. She aspires to publish her doctoral research and continue researching the impact of MA on university students. Her PhD thesis abstract can be accessed here https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.81316.
Her multidisciplinary educational background has had a substantial impact on her research interests and teaching practice. She obtained BA Honours in Philosophy and Psychology followed by master’s in Sociology from the University of Mumbai. Her goal was to get a PhD in Sociology in order to fulfil my aspiration to serve academia as a social scientist. However, she decided to read mathematics with the Open University and was awarded First Class honours in Mathematical Sciences. This sparked off her teaching career in HE with a lecturing post in mathematics and statistics in the Mathematics Department at the University of Hertfordshire (UH), and was followed by her post as a lecturer, examiner, and course leader in Quantitative Methods at the University of Hertfordshire business school (UHBS).
Meena has been teaching mathematics, statistics, and operational research methods at the London School of Economics (LSE) since 2006. In 2011, she initiated student-led education at LSE. She has been named as an LSE Innovator and is an LSE Teaching Prize Winner for both statistics & operational research methods (2008, 2013 and 2016). She was included in Jisc’s list of the 50 most influential university education professionals. Meena is an invited member of The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) Education committee and the IMA London branch committee since October 2013. She has been presenting invited sessions at the RSS annual international conferences since 2016. In July 2017, she was invited to speak about teaching excellence at the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) conference. She was a keynote speaker at a conference “Teaching Statistics to Non-Specialists”. Her keynote talk was entitled "Teaching Statistics to Non-Specialists-What can we learn from the social scientists?” This conference took place in June 2019 and was led by academics from the Universities of Nottingham, and Birmingham. Since 2015, Meena has co-organised three mathematics education international conferences in collaboration with the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and the University of Glasgow in 2015; the University of Warwick in 2016; and the Open University in 2017. Furthermore, she co-chaired the scientific committees of the first two of these conferences.
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