Research productivity is typically measured by outputs: publications, grant activity, conference presentations, experimental throughput. Teaching rarely enters that accounting — it is treated as a parallel obligation, something that runs alongside research rather than feeding into it. Justin Jadali’s engagement with technical education suggests a different relationship between the two. His involvement in teaching spans multiple levels of formality, extends from graduate students to middle schoolers, and reflects a consistent orientation toward technical communication that is not incidental to his development as a researcher. It is part of it.
Teaching the Capstone: What That Role Actually Requires
At Yale, Jadali serves as a teaching assistant for the mechanical engineering capstone — the culminating design and project course that undergraduate students complete before graduation. The capstone is not a lecture course. It is a project-based environment where students are expected to integrate what they have learned across their undergraduate curriculum into a defined engineering deliverable, typically working in teams with real design constraints.
Supporting that environment as a TA is different from leading a recitation section or grading problem sets. It requires the ability to diagnose where a student’s technical understanding breaks down, to reframe concepts in terms that are accessible without sacrificing precision, and to provide guidance that moves a team’s project forward without doing the work for them. These demands — diagnosis, reframing, structured support — are not unrelated to the demands of experimental research. Both require a researcher to hold a clear model of a complex system, identify where something is not working, and intervene with precision.
Jadali’s role in the capstone reflects not just a willingness to teach but a capacity to operate effectively in an environment where the problems are open-ended and the correct answer is not always obvious in advance.
Teaching 3D Printing to Middle Schoolers: A Different Kind of Communication Challenge
Earlier in his academic career, Jadali volunteered to teach 3D printing to middle school students. The contrast with the capstone TA role is instructive. Where capstone students arrive with four years of engineering training and are expected to produce technically sophisticated work, middle school students bring curiosity without a technical vocabulary, enthusiasm without an established framework for understanding how things work.
Teaching 3D printing to that audience is not simply a matter of demonstrating how to operate a printer. It requires building a mental model — explaining layer deposition, material behavior, and design constraints in terms that connect to what a 12- or 13-year-old already understands — and doing so in a way that preserves the fundamental accuracy of the engineering concepts rather than distorting them in the name of simplicity.
That challenge is harder than it looks. Researchers who can explain their work clearly to non-expert audiences have developed something distinct from domain expertise: the ability to identify which concepts are load-bearing — which ones, if misunderstood, would prevent the listener from grasping anything that follows — and to explain those first, in the right order, at the right level of abstraction. Jadali’s willingness to do this work with middle school students is a marker of that capacity.
The Relationship Between Teaching and Research Rigor
There is a well-documented relationship between teaching and the consolidation of technical knowledge. The act of explaining a concept — particularly to an audience that will ask questions the teacher has not anticipated — surfaces gaps in understanding that may not be visible from within a specialized research context. A researcher who teaches regularly is forced to revisit the foundations of what they know, to articulate assumptions that are usually implicit, and to rebuild their understanding of a field from the ground up on a periodic basis.
For a researcher working at the intersection of mechanical engineering and cell biology, as Jadali does, that process of articulation is particularly valuable. His research draws on polymer chemistry, mechanical characterization, mammalian cell culture, and microscopy — disciplines that each have their own vocabulary, conventions, and conceptual frameworks. Being able to explain any one of them to a non-specialist requires having internalized it well enough to translate it, which is a different cognitive demand than being able to apply it within a known experimental protocol.
The teaching roles Jadali has taken on — spanning graduate-level project mentorship and introductory STEM outreach — suggest that this kind of translation is something he has practiced in multiple registers. That practice is an asset to his research, not a distraction from it.
Science Communication as a Structural Investment
Beyond its effect on research rigor, engagement with technical education reflects a set of commitments about how scientific knowledge should move through a community. Research that is produced and consumed only within a narrow expert audience has limited reach, both in terms of public understanding and in terms of inspiring the next generation of researchers and engineers.
Jadali’s willingness to work with middle school students on 3D printing technology — a direct precursor to the additive manufacturing and biofabrication methods he uses in his Yale research — is a tangible investment in the pipeline that produces future engineers and scientists. It is not philanthropic abstraction. It is a concrete act of science communication performed at the level where it has the highest leverage: before a student has decided whether engineering is something that belongs to them.
For a researcher whose own academic path began earlier than the standard timeline — skipping his junior and senior years of high school after a perfect ACT score, earning three associate degrees before transferring to UCLA — there is something coherent about that investment. Justin Jadali’s own trajectory was shaped by early access to serious technical education. His outreach work suggests an understanding that such access is not equally distributed, and that researchers who can close that gap have reason to do so.
Teaching as Part of a Complete Research Identity
The most productive researchers are typically not only skilled at generating data. They are skilled at communicating what that data means — to collaborators, to reviewers, to funding bodies, and to the broader scientific community. The habits of clear explanation, structured argument, and audience-aware communication that teaching develops are the same habits that produce well-written manuscripts, coherent grant narratives, and effective conference presentations.
Justin Jadali’s engagement with teaching, from the Yale capstone to middle school STEM outreach, is not ancillary to his research identity. It is part of what that identity is built from — a consistent commitment to technical communication that predates his graduate work and will likely extend beyond it.
About Justin Jadali
Justin Jadali is a mechanical engineer and biomedical engineering researcher currently completing his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University. He earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UCLA as part of the Class of 2025, following three Associate of Science degrees in Physics, Mathematics, and Natural Sciences from Irvine Valley College. At Yale, his research focuses on alginate microparticle fabrication, crosslinking systems, and the quantification of microvessel self-assembly in three-dimensional tissue constructs. He has hands-on experience in polymer processing, cell culture, and microscopy workflows, and has served as a teaching assistant for the Yale mechanical engineering capstone. He is also the founder of an e-commerce company that he grew to approximately 10 employees before selling at a six-figure valuation.
