Introduction
I serve as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at Rollins College and am a Professor in the Department of Biology. Immediately prior to joining Rollins, I was Director for the Division of Undergraduate Education at National Science Foundation (NSF) and coordinated 14 Federal agencies in implementing the undergraduate strategic objectives of the first Federal STEM Education 5-Year Strategic Plan. Previously, I served as the Laurence McKinley Gould Professor, in the Biology and Cognitive Science Departments at Carleton College for 30 years, where I had the opportunity to direct the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching (Research done at Carleton).
My research integrates plant biology and education with a focus on improving undergraduate education at scale. I am a developmental biologist who studies flowering in legumes and does research on learning in genomics. Currently my colleague Ann Austin at Michigan State and I are studying organizational change networks focused on facilitating widespread improvement in undergraduate STEM education, supported by a generous grant from the NSF (NSF Project Abstract).
I am a AAAS fellow and received the American Society of Plant Biology Teaching Award and Botanical Society of America Charles Bessey Award. I have served on numerous boards, including the NSF Education and Human Resources advisory committee and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) Board on Science Education, where I chaired the committees responsible for America’s Lab Report, Promising Practices in STEM Undergraduate Education, andDiscipline-based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering. Currently I serve on the NASEM Roundtable on Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education and am chair-elect for the AAAS Education Section.