My name is David Velasco. As a math and science tutor, I provide my students with the resources that they need in order to succeed in classes ranging in difficulty from Freshman Algebra to University Physics. In addition, I prepare students for standardized tests (SSAT, Terra Nova, PSAT, SAT, ACT, SAT II, AP), and I help students work their way through the college application process. I believe that compassionate teaching based on the understanding that each student is an individual with particular strengths and weaknesses is the key to helping students improve and gain academic confidence.

Tessellate Tutoring is a private tutoring service that I started. I presently serve as the lead tutor. A wide variety of services are offered ranging from academic content tutoring to language instruction, essay editing, and help with the college admissions process. I have experience working with a diverse range of clients, including students with learning differences. My goal is to offer academic tutoring to under-served communities and those experiencing financial hardship.

I hope to one day be a high school math and science teacher; in pursuit of this goal, I teach as much as possible, and I have taken classes towards my undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, Loyola University, and Northeastern Illinois University. I am presently enrolled at Depaul in order to finish the requirements to be certified as a high school physics and math teacher in the state of Illinois. I have nine years of experience in tutoring Latin, Attic Greek, math, science, test preparation, ESL, and college application essay editing. I attained the bulk of this experience tutoring students in the North Shore suburbs and students at selective enrollments high schools in Chicago.

I believe that compassionate teaching based on the understanding that each student is an individual with particular strengths and weaknesses is the key to helping students improve and gain academic confidence. I provide my students with the resources that they need in order to succeed in their classes and to take ownership of their own learning. I am a firm advocate of the idea that a tutor's principal mission is to teach a student how to teach themselves, how to problem solve, and how to work in an organized fashion. Although I believe that learning should be taken seriously, I cultivate a low stress environment in my tutoring sessions so that my students feel at ease and can work at their own pace; I often pepper my lessons with silly jokes and trivia. When I am not teaching or studying, I enjoy playing stringed instruments (viola, guitar, sitar), practicing Aikido, cooking spicy food, and watching films.

As a fledgling researcher, I am fascinated by the emergent complexity found in the world, particularly how it manifests itself in language and in physical law. My research interests in Linguistics are in the computational implementation of linguistic theories, in the discovery and implementation of learning algorithms for linguistic models, and in grammar induction through implemented machine learning. I am currently working on a project that involves developing methods of better visualizing linguistic data . I am applying these methods to morphophonological phenomena found in Spanish verbs in hopes that it will help in improving the results of an unsupervised learning algorithm of morphology. I am planning on applying this work to French and Arabic data.

My research experience in physics is limited to work on imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes and to work on the detection of optical transients. I enjoyed this work because it allowed me to indirectly study some of the highest energy phenomena in the universe and some of the more exotic phenomena. Additionally, I am interested in the so-called "mesoscopic regime" as an arena for testing the reductionist hypothesis. More recently, I have had the opportunity to work on experimental particle physics projects aimed at the creation of a novel kind of bubble chamber. These novel bubbe chambers will be used for the direct detection of dark matter and to study coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering. I conduct this work both at Northwestern and at Fermilab. This recent work has led to my growing interest in astroparticles, cosmology, and dark sector physics.

This site is presently under construction, but please feel free to contact me at velascodavid00 at gmail.