Blog post

TA spotlight: Dara Rahmat Samii

June 26, 2026

By Josephine Guan, Educational Developer, Centre for Teaching and Learning

Source: The Centre for Teaching & Learning

Dara Samii recently completed his Masters in Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering at Concordia and received a 2026 Gina Cody TA Teaching Excellence award. He worked as a teaching assistant (TA) at Concordia since 2023 for a variety of courses. He conducted lab sessions and demonstrations for undergraduate courses in Fluid Mechanics, Heat transfer, and Thermodynamics, and lead tutorial sections for C++/Arduino Programming, Statics, Advanced Calculus, and CFD for Aerospace Engineering.

Teaching excellence celebrates impactful and innovative teaching that focuses on student learning. What especially stood out with Dara’s dossier was the consistent feedback from students and colleagues about his personable approach to teaching and his use of visuals to support his teaching.

We caught up with Dara to chat more about his teaching style, what he’s learned along the way, and his tips for TAs just getting started.

Resources shared by Dara

One of Dara’s diagrams using Tikz LaTex editor

$A schematic of an irregularly shaped vessel showing fluid flow, with a green inlet flow FinF_{\text{in}}Fin entering on the left and a red outlet flow FoutF_{\text{out}}Fout exiting on the right. The interior volume VVV and its boundary ∂V\partial V∂V are labeled. A side panel presents two approaches to finding the accumulation rate—volume integral of divergence and surface flux (in minus out)—and states the divergence theorem relating the two.$ Intuition behind the divergence theorem by Dara Rahmat Samii is licensed under CC BY 4.0 International

Youtubers such as GeekingJadi and 3Blue1Brown were inspirations for Dara’s teaching approach.

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Are you interested in or are currently a teaching assistant at Concordia? Be sure to consult all our resources on teaching for TAs.