dr. A (Antonija) Rimac-van Heerwaarden

dr. A (Antonija) Rimac-van Heerwaarden

Docent

About me:

Education is my passion. There is no greater reward than to see students develop their critical thinking and problem resolving skills. This is my main motivation to be a lecturer. Since I was a student in gymnasium, I enjoyed studying physics. I see the understanding of physical laws and processes as the cornerstone for understanding other sciences and for understanding the world in which we live. At the moment, I work as education developer, lecturer and course coordinator at Wageningen University.

Education related:

- I co-developed and coordinate "Learn the scientific method in a changing climate course", a dynamic e-learning course on scientific methods. In this course, I provide the domain-specific knowledge (related to the atmospheric boundary layer), and guide the students in the development of their research project by focusing on core concepts of the scientific world.

- I co-developed "Inter-university sustainability challenge", an elective course open for BSc students where in the CBL setup we engage with the sustainable city of the future, the city of 1.5 degrees.

- I co-developed and coordinate "Soil, Water, Atmosphere - Personal development path", a course that is sort of a companion that goes along with student throughout their journey in the BSc programme Soil, Water, Atmosphere (next to students' other courses it stratches over the full length of their BSc).

- I coordinate BSc thesis trajectory for the Soil, Water, Atmosphere programme, and I develop templates, assessment rubrics and course material for this trajectory.

- I devlop practicals using jupyter notebooks for various courses within BSc and MSc programmes. I have been developping a series of low-tech video clips to support my teaching.

Research interests:   

- Educational research projects: projects aiming to ensure a successful future of (online) challenge-based learning courses across universities.

- Glacier dynamics: run explicit glacier models in order to analyze the glacier length records and to reconstruct climate in remote areas across the globe.

- Ocean dynamics: analyse the energetics of the ocean using a global ocean general circulation model. This research is mainly focused on the influence of high-resolution wind stress field on the oceanic energy.