Steering Committee

Simon Bates the Academic Director at the University of British Columbia’s Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (CTLT). In that role, he provides academic leadership to the CTLT which, combined with his role as Senior Advisor Teaching and Learning, ensures the Centre is best positioned to support development, delivery and evaluation of outstanding teaching and learning across all Faculties and units. A current principal focus is supporting projects funded through UBC’s Flexible Learning Initiative, a major multi-year educational transformation program currently underway. In addition, Simon holds a faculty position as Professor of Teaching in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, teaching on the PHYS 101 course and contributing to their Physics Education Research efforts.

Stephanie Chasteen focuses on STEM educational reform, with a focus on faculty and institutional adoption of evidence-based teaching practices.  She is the Associate Director of the Science Education Initiative (http://colorado.edu/sei), which supported departmentally-led course transformations at CU Boulder.  She is also working with the Center for STEM Learning (http://colorado.edu/csl) and the Colorado Learning Assistant Program (http://laprogram.colorado.edu).  She produces pedagogical videos for the PhET Interactive Simulations (http://phet.colorado.edu) as their Multimedia Director. Lastly, she has an active consulting practice (see http://sciencegeekgirl.com) providing pedagogical workshops, video production, external evaluation, and other services to support educational change in science.

Dr. Chasteen is a physicist by training, and her career has included a focus on writing about science for the general public (including an internship at NPR’s science desk), working with teachers and the public at the Exploratorium Museum of Science in San Francisco.  She has been at the University of Colorado Boulder since 2007 – first as a postdoctoral fellow creating curricular materials and researching change in upper-division physics courses, and later with a focus on faculty professional development and educational change.  She has created numerous videos and workshops for faculty to help them develop learning goals, as well as to use clickers and peer instruction effectively.  Her current work combines her experience in communication to broad audiences, faculty development, and education research to support meaningful change programs.

Noah Finkelstein is a Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and conducts research is in physics education. He serves as a director of the Physics Education Research (PER) group at Colorado. Finkelstein is also a Director of the national-scale Center for STEM Learning at CU-Boulder, which has become one of eight national demonstration sites for the Association of American Universities’ STEM Education Initiative.

Finkelstein’s research focuses on studying the conditions that support students’ interest and ability in physics – developing models of context. These research projects range from the specifics of student learning particular concepts, to the departmental and institutional scales of sustainable educational transformation.  This research has resulted in over 100 publications.

He is increasingly involved in education policy serving on many national boards including chairing the American Physical Society’s Committee on Education, and is a Technical Advisor to the Association of American University’s STEM Education Initiative. He serves on the Board of Trustees for the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits more than 1,000 institutions of higher education in the U.S.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Presidential Teaching Scholar for the University of Colorado system.

Brian Frank is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,  the Dupont Canada Chair in Engineering Education Research and Development, and the Director of Program Development in the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science where he works on engineering curriculum development, program assessment, and developing educational technology.  His teaching interest is project based courses, and he currently coordinates APSC-100, a required course that includes a semester-long team client-based design project, primarily service learning projects. He was also co-chair of the Physical Sciences panel of the HEQCO Sector-based Tuning project, developing proposals for learning outcomes in physical sciences, social sciences, and life and health sciences in Ontario. He is a co-founder of the Canadian Engineering Education Association, and is currently coordinating the Engineering Graduate Attribute Development Project, working to develop national guidelines and resources for outcomes assessment in engineering education. Currently he is co-principal investigator of Queen’s University’s project on the HEQCO Learning Outcomes Consortium.

Dennis Groth is currently the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Indiana University Bloomington.  In this role, his responsibility includes initiatives aimed at enhancing student success, faculty excellence in teaching, and programs in academic advising, undergraduate student support, engaged learning, general education assessment, and academic student support.  He is Associate Professor of Informatics, with a research focus on the development of new database access and data mining techniques in support of data visualization activities, as well as understanding models of exploration in digital environments.  He was the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies for the School of Informatics from 2008 to 2013, where he was responsible for curricular programs, student services, advising, academic operations, and career services.  While Undergraduate Dean, he developed strategies and initiatives leading to sustained growth of student, more than doubling the number of student majors, along with targeted, intentional programs enhancing diversity that has lead to a tripling of the number of undergraduate women majors.  Simultaneous with his school leadership role, he was Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education from 2009 to 2013.  In this capacity, he was responsible for a variety of critical campus programs, including curricular procedures, outreach, service learning, continuing and adult education, course evaluation processes, and test administration.  Prior to entering the academy, Dennis had almost 15 years of professional experience in commercial software development, primarily in the healthcare arena.

Dr. Harrison Keller is Vice Provost for Higher Education Policy and Research and Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning/Continuing and Innovative Education at The University of Texas at Austin.  Dr. Keller is responsible for developing institutional initiatives and state and national policy solutions in line with the University’s strategic priorities, with emphasis on preparation, affordability, productivity, and new educational delivery models.  He oversees UT Austin participation in the edX Consortium and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Personalized Learning Network and has developed multiple initiatives related to blended and online learning including Texas OnRamps, a path breaking dual credit initiative supported by the Texas Legislature, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Lumina Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.  Dr. Keller holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy with honors from the University of Notre Dame and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University.

Patti McDougall is the Vice-Provost, Teaching and Learning at the University of Saskatchewan. She holds a Ph.D. in Human, Learning, Development and Instruction at the University of British Columbia. Patti joined the University of Saskatchewan in January of 2013. She comes to her position having previously served as the Assistant, Associate and Interim Dean at St. Thomas More College (federated with the University of Saskatchewan). As a developmental and educational psychologist, Patti’s research follows multiple streams including social relationships in childhood and adolescence (e.g., bullying, friendship), youth-adult partnerships, and the experience of educational transitions (e.g., into high school, into university).

Marco Molinaro, Ph.D., is the Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Director of the iAMSTEM Education Hub at UCD. Dr. Molinaro has been a project director of numerous nationally funded STEM educational and training programs for grades 6-16 and has developed and taught multiple undergraduate courses. He has over 19 years of educational experience creating and leading applications of technology for instruction, scientific visualization and simulation, curriculum, and science exhibits for students from elementary school through graduate school and for the general public. The educational technology products he has developed are still in use many years later as part of nationwide curricular projects such as FOSS (upper elementary and middle school science), Chemlinks (undergraduate chemistry instruction) and Nanozone.org (public exhibit on nanotechnology). Most recently Molinaro is leading a UC Davis university wide STEM education effort working across all STEM disciplines to improve undergraduate STEM student success – the iAMSTEM Hub. As part of the effort, the Hub is bringing together the campus educational STEM community and relevant resources, working with faculty across STEM departments to evolve the undergraduate STEM curriculum, and developing new academic analytics tools and approaches to help guide instructional change and maximize student success. His projects have been funded though the NSF, NIH and various private foundations such as Gates and Helmsley.

 

Simon M. Peacock has served as Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia since 2006; he is a Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. As Dean, Dr. Peacock focuses on advancing disciplinary and interdisciplinary education and research initiatives across the physical, life, and mathematical sciences.  Over the past seven years, UBC’s Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative has significantly improved student learning for more than 15,000 students enrolled in large undergraduate science courses through the adoption of the most effective, evidence-based science education practices. Dr. Peacock and his colleagues recently developed First Year Seminars in Science, a small class experience focused on critical scientific thinking and communication skills, which was awarded the 2013 Alan Blizzard Award by Canada’s Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.  Dr. Peacock served as President of the Canadian Council of Deans of Science in 2010-11 and he is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.   Prior to joining UBC in 2006, Dr. Peacock was a Professor of Geology at Arizona State University and served as Divisional Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Chair of the Department of Geological Sciences.  Dr. Peacock earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Geology from MIT (1981) and a Ph.D. in Geology from UCLA (1985). He has taught courses that collectively span most of the geological sciences at the introductory, undergraduate, and advanced graduate levels.  His research focuses on understanding the tectonic structure of subduction zones, earthquakes, and volcanism.  He has published more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals including Science, Nature, and the Journal of Geological Education.

George Rehrey directs the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Program at Indiana University’s Bloomington campus (IUB), leading efforts to fully integrate and institutionalize a program with a 16-year history of success. He is also a Principal Instructional Consultant with IUB’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, where he supports instructors of all ranks as they transform their courses, conduct classroom research, collect evidence of student learning, form communities of inquiry, and disseminate their work locally, nationally, and internationally. This past year George played an instrumental role in the design and implementation of a new program review process now required of all 44 departments within the College of Arts and Sciences. George is a co-founding member of the Institute for Curriculum and Campus Internationalization as well as the Internationalization Collaborative Across Bloomington (ICAB), a Title VI funded project that brings faculty together from IUB and Ivy Tech Community Colleges. ICAB participants work collectively on  the integration of global student learning outcomes within curricula. George’s current SOTL research includes the learning of geological time, the problems of academic integrity as a cultural phenomenon in computer science courses, the effect of backward course design upon student engagement and, the influence that social and economic reward systems may have upon academic development programs.

Jill Scott is Vice-Provost (Teaching and Learning) and Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Queen’s University. She is the author of Electra after Freud (Cornell University Press, 2005), A Poetics of Forgiveness (Palgrave, 2010) and a co-edited volume (with Leo Riegert and Jack Shuler), Thinking and Practicing Reconciliation: Teaching and Learning Through Literary Responses to Conflict (Cambridge Scholars Press). She is the Principal Investigator for the HEQCO Learning Outcomes Assessment study at Queen’s, and her current research projects include: “MicroWriting: Twitter Teaching for Clear, Concise and Convincing Communication” and “Kaswentha: Haudenosaunee Peacebuilding Practices and the Future of Indigenous-Settler Relations in Canada.” She is leading Queen’s portion of a Productivity and Innovation Fund project on Student Rating of Instruction, and together with Brian Frank , she is developing a Bay View Alliance Research Action Cluster on the development of transferable intellectual skills.

James V. Staros received his undergraduate education at Dartmouth, where he became hooked on research and co-authored his first published scientific paper with his undergraduate research advisor.  He was a NSF Graduate Fellow at Yale, where he earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemistry at Harvard.

Staros began his faculty career at Vanderbilt in 1978, serving as a department chair 1988-2002.  In 2002, Dr. Staros was named Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Stony Brook (SUNY).  In 2009, he became Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs & Provost of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with a faculty appointment as Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, a position that he assumed full time in September 2014 when he stepped out of his administrative post.

In addition to leading a vigorous research program, Staros has been very active in bringing innovations into the science classroom and teaching laboratory.   In 1991, in a successful proposal to the HHMI Undergraduate Biological Sciences Education Program, he designed a networked wet teaching laboratory as part of a total overhaul of introductory biology.  In 1995, he posted his first hypertext syllabus for a course he taught in a computer classroom designed and built with support from another HHMI grant.  More recently, he has been a strong proponent of Team-Based Learning (TBL), with the result that UMass Amherst has constructed seven IT-enhanced TBL classrooms on campus and has provided support for faculty converting courses to TBL format through its Center for Teaching & Faculty Development.

Gabriela C. Weaver is Vice Provost for Faculty Development, Director of the Center for Teaching and Faculty Development and professor of chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Dr. Weaver received her B.S. in Chemistry in 1989 from the California Institute of Technology, and her Ph.D. in Chemical Physics in 1994 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Weaver joined the Chemistry faculty at the University of Colorado at Denver in 1994 and joined the Chemistry faculty at Purdue University in 2001, where she served as Associate Head of the department from 2008-2009 and as the Jerry and Rosie Semler Director of the Discovery Learning Research Center from 2008-2014.  Dr. Weaver’s research work in science education has focused on using inquiry-based methods for teaching science and on supplementing innovative instruction with technology tools.  She has also engaged in work on faculty development and institutional transformation toward institutionalizing research-based teaching practices.

From 2004-2012 she directed the NSF-funded Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (CASPiE), a consortium of 17 universities and 2-year colleges that developed and implemented a teaching approach to provide 1st and 2nd year undergraduate students with authentic research experiences as part of their laboratory coursework. Initially developed for chemistry, the program is now being adopted in other science disciplines, including biology and atmospheric sciences. Over 5200 students at 17 institutions nationwide and in Australia have been through the program in the last 5 years. The success of the program among several different dimensions of learning and perception has been assessed. New institutions continue to adapt the CASPiE approach – the newest of which is the United States Military Academy at West Point, combining research projects in analytical chemistry, toxicology and chemical engineering through the CASPiE framework.

Dan Bernstein is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas.   He was at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln from 1973 until 2002, when he became Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at KU.  His recent writing has focused on electronic course portfolios centered on student learning, and he works with colleagues from many fields of study to showcase the quality of their student work and the practices that have helped that work emerge.  Recent grants from the Teagle and Spencer Foundations have enhanced writing and library skills through team-designed assignments and the use of assessment data in course and curriculum change.  Currently he explores and evaluates various uses of technology to promote student understanding, and his ongoing courses are a laboratory for evaluating the impact of out of class web-based activities on deep understanding of conceptual material. A new grant from the Teagle Foundation is developing use of active and student centered learning in humanities, both in and out of class time. He was a Charter Member of the University of Nebraska Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and he was a Carnegie Scholar in 1998. Recently he received the J. Michael Young Academic Advising Award at KU and the Fred S. Keller Behavioral Education Award from Div. 25 of the American Psychological Association.  He has completed his service at the KU CTE and continues as a psychology professor.

Howard Gobstein is the Executive Vice President for Research, Innovation, and STEM Education at A۰P۰L۰U.  He co-directs both the Science and Mathematics Teacher Imperative (SMTI) and the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTEP). He initiated SMTI and is also responsible for university policy efforts pertaining to research, education and economic development. His past positions include associate vice president for governmental affairs and director of federal relations at Michigan State University, senior policy analyst in the Office of Science and Technology in the Executive Office of the President, and vice president and senior program officer at the Association of American Universities (AAU). Gobstein spent the first 11 years of his career designing and leading evaluations of government science programs and policies with the U.S. Government Accountability Office. He holds a master’s degree in science, technology and public policy from George Washington University and a bachelor’s in interdisciplinary engineering from Purdue University. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was named the distinguished alumni of 2010 by the Purdue School of Engineering Education.

Emily Miller joined the Association of American Universities (AAU) in 2012 as the project manager for AAU’s Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative.  Previously she worked with the Association for Community College Trustees (ACCT) as a research and curriculum specialist.  During her graduate studies, Miller worked on grant projects focused on international partnerships for higher education development as well as a series of programs aimed at addressing the opportunities, changes, and challenges occurring in faculty careers and the academic workplace.  In addition, she collaborated with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) with their board education and consulting services as well as on research examining faculty engagement in institutional governance.

Miller was an assistant director of career services at Tufts University and worked in alumni relations at Harvard Business School.  Prior to working in higher education, she worked in government contracts litigation with Wiley, Rein & Fielding, LLP.

Miller earned her PhD in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education from Michigan State University; MA in Education Policy and Management from Harvard Graduate School of Education; and BA, cum laude and with honors, in Political Science from Gettysburg College.

Miller has published on the topics of post-secondary institutional leadership, specifically as it relates to governance and administration; organizational change in universities and colleges; and higher education policy. She is also a professional lecturer of higher education at The George Washington University and is an active member of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Kacy is director of science and mathematics education policy, APLU, manages SMTI, a commitment by 132 public research universities to improve undergraduate science and mathematics teaching and teacher preparation. She is co-director of the Network of STEM Education Centers (NSEC), funded by NSF (1524832) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She serves as staff lead for APLU’s Research Intensive Committee, a committee of 15 presidents of RU1 institutions and for the Task Force on Laboratory Safety. She also supports the senior research officers through the Council on Research at APLU. Before joining APLU, she served as a science and technology policy fellow at the National Academy of Sciences on the Board of Higher Education and Workforce. Redd received her PhD in neuroscience from Columbia University, where she was funded by a HHMI Predoctoral Fellowship.

David Stewart is a consultant with a focus on cross-border (Canada-US) education and innovation initiatives. Currently, he is a Program Advisor to the Bay View Alliance and had previously served as BVA’s Program Manager through its early and seed phase. He also consults with several clients on US-Canada projects, including the Digital Moose Lounge (a network of Canadians in Silicon Valley), Expansion Quebec, the Waterloo Region in Ontario, and the Government of Canada. From 2007 to 2012, he served as the Academic Relations Officer with the Canadian Consulate in Palo Alto CA, conducting outreach with universities and advancing Canadian interests in the region. From 2005 – 2007, he was Executive Director of International House, a Charlotte NC based non-profit where he had previously founded Charlotte’s first community immigration law clinic. He began his career as a lawyer in Toronto and Massachusetts, including legal and HR management with the internet company Lycos. He holds a B.A. (History) and an LL.B. (Law) from McGill University, and an M.A. (Intercultural Relations) from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

Dr. Harvey P. Weingarten is president and CEO of The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) — an arm’s length agency of the Ontario government that conducts research and provides policy advice to government to improve the accessibility, quality and accountability of colleges and universities.  HEQCO is the only organization of its type in Canada. Since joining HEQCO in 2010, Dr. Weingarten has expanded the agency’s advisory role and influence with government and has orchestrated a larger public information mandate for HEQCO. Prior to HEQCO, Dr. Weingarten was president and vice-chancellor of the University of Calgary for nine years. Under his leadership, the university increased access, invested in students, recruited world-class faculty and attracted record amounts of research revenue and philanthropic support. Dr. Weingarten was provost at McMaster University from 1996 to 2001.  During a 21-year career at McMaster he served as dean of science, professor of psychology, department chair, and a teacher and mentor to many undergraduate and graduate students. His research examined the biological and psychological controls of eating and body weight. He received his B.Sc. from McGill University, and his M.S., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Dr. Weingarten has served on many boards and councils including the Science, Technology and Innovation Council of Canada; Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada; Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network; and Shad Valley.