Rate My Professor Polin Yadak

Polin Yadak serves as a Lecturer Faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at San Francisco State University, where she instructs in the Pre-Health Post-Baccalaureate Certificate Program. She earned her M.S. in Physics from San Francisco State University in 2010 and her Ed.D. in Learning and Instruction from the University of San Francisco in 2020. Since 2007, Yadak has taught physics and astronomy courses at various Bay Area colleges, including San Francisco State University, Skyline College, City College of San Francisco, and Cañada College. She joined the Pre-Health Post-Baccalaureate Program in 2010, designing physics bootcamps and teaching lecture and laboratory courses for highly motivated post-baccalaureate students preparing for health professions careers.

Yadak is committed to educational equity, having coded about 400 physics and astronomy questions from open resources into MyOpenMath, enabling free student access to homework systems and textbooks. Her doctoral dissertation examined the gender gap on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) through a meta-analysis of 22 studies from U.S. and international high schools and universities, analyzing 34 pretest and 43 posttest results. Pretest effect sizes averaged 0.62 favoring males, narrowing to 0.26 posttest, moderated by factors including school level, teaching methods, culture, and FCI content. During her master's research, she contributed to studies on photonic properties of disordered materials, co-authoring publications such as 'Photonic band gap in isotropic hyperuniform disordered solids with low dielectric contrast' (2013), 'Using Microwave and Macroscopic Samples of Dielectric Solids to Study the Photonic Properties of Disordered Photonic Bandgap Materials' (2014), 'Preparing STEM Students for Success in Physics Through an Intensive Summer Program' (2013), 'Measurement of photonic band diagram in non-crystalline photonic band gap (PBG) materials' (2011), and others, with total citations exceeding 200. She received the Department Graduate Research Scholarship in 2009.