Ph.D. Biological Sciences, Purdue University
B.A. Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado at Boulder

My role as an educator is to prepare students to tackle complex problems, identify criticalissues, and collaborate toward creative solutions.

To do this in the classroom, I prioritize sketching models, constructing explanations, and arguing claims with evidence. I align my lessons with education research to engage students in challenging and rewarding work when I teach.

To help students achieve, I guide them as partners. I use collaborative group work, large projects, frequent assessments, and activities to create a dynamic learning environment with minimal lecturing and support all my students’ success. I frequently partner with community organizations to find messy, overlooked data sets for students to work with.

My research spans several key areas related to data visualization and STEM education:

Teaching STEM Practices: I research the teaching of scientific practices such as analysis, modeling, and explaining. I investigate activities and assessments that support these practices and their impact on different student groups.

Mechanistic and Systems Thinking: I study mechanistic and systems thinking to understand how people conceptualize the world and how this changes through time. This involves visualizing and testing these frameworks to determine their usefulness to students as they learn.

Mapping Scholarship: Using tools from information sciences, I analyze and synthesize disciplinary scholarship related to STEM education. By creating maps of published scholarship, I visualize relationships between impactful ideas and identify opportunities for future research.

Data Visualization in Education: My work includes using data visualization to conduct research in science education (assessment tools), empower students to work with data (undergraduate research experiences), and provide insights into how students learn (learning research). This involves developing innovative methods for visualizing qualitative and quantitative data.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: I am co-PI for the NSF-funded MolecularCaseNet, engaging faculty nationwide in interdisciplinary collaborative projects that bridge biology, chemistry, molecular visualization, bioinformatics, and education. This includes developing molecular case studies. I serve as the education researcher to understand how faculty develop their teaching.