Dr. Charlotte Desvages

University Teacher in Mathematical Computing at the University of Edinburgh School of Mathematics

Dr. Charlotte Desvages grew up in France with a love for math and music. After studying physics as an undergraduate, she went on to pursue her master’s in Acoustics and Music Technology and later Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh and never left. Charlotte now holds a full-time teaching position in the math department where she teaches mathematical computing.

 

Physics Background

Growing up in France, Charlotte had always loved her math classes. But after her first semester as a math major at Université Caen Normandie, She quickly realized she preferred physical applications over pure math and shifted to physics. During her undergraduate years, Charlotte admits that she was not fond of her programming classes; she found learning languages dissatisfying as she didn’t really see the point. It was not until she simulated a planetary system generated from code she had written that Charlotte began to realize that programming skills were not separate from theory, but rather closely linked and deeply embedded. 

 

Combining Passions

Despite having no formal training, Charlotte describes her interest in music as a social passion she developed in her early teenage years. Applying her physics studies to music intrigued Charlotte so shortly after earning her Bachelor of Science in Physics, she moved to Scotland to pursue a master’s in Acoustics and Music Technology at the University of Edinburgh. Charlotte continued to take programming classes in her master’s program, including a Digital Signal Processing class. The combination of math and programming coursework motivated her, especially when there was something to hear and see at the end. To Charlotte, learning to program was a useful tool, a new way of expanding what she liked doing, opening up more things to investigate beyond the limitations of a pen and paper.

Charlotte carried her interest in simulations to her Ph.D. research in which she worked on building a computational model of string instruments to produce realistic sound synthesis for digital composers. She appreciated that the 5-year long project, funded by the European Commission, was driven by a creative purpose and at the center of physics, computing, and music. Her research was primarily concerned with understanding musical instruments as physical systems governed by differential equations which were then used to construct a physics-based simulation of sound.

 

Teaching at the University of Edinburgh

While Charlotte did not have a strong sense of what career she wanted to pursue as an undergraduate, the idea of an academic career and the opportunity to continue to learn and perform research was appealing to her. She returned to her math roots in 2018 when she took on a teaching position in the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh where she continues to teach computing courses to math students. Her background in physics has helped her teach computing to non-computing majors in part by simply being able to empathize with being made to study something students may not necessarily have an interest in. Charlotte has found that asking students to code with a tangible connection to models, examples, or systems can sometimes be far more valuable and inspiring than just looking at the mathematics. 

 

Diversity in the Classroom

In addition to her teaching position, Charlotte also serves as one of the Equity Diversity and Inclusion Leads for the math department. Before taking on the role in 2020, she had worked extensively to introduce more collaborative work opportunities to her classes, such as pair programming and peer assessments. 

Charlotte has also taken part in fostering broader conversations about decolonizing curriculums. She explained one way of doing this is being intentional with both the language used in the classroom and also the pedagogical approaches – for instance, how instructors can accessibly present course material. Charlotte explained that she purposefully talks to underrepresented students and acknowledges the skills students have attained through her programming class. She also impressed the need to contextualize data literacy and historical figures by emphasizing to students that these skills, datasets, and examples do not exist in a vacuum. 

She hopes that making these changes and adopting these types of approaches to learning to compute will create a more inclusive community that recognizes how people learn from each other. 

“Diversity of thought comes from diversity of background is my belief. And that can only make departments, institutions, the field, and society generally richer to just have people with different backgrounds better represented in that discipline.”