Presenters

Sandra Courter
Director, Engineering Learning Center
University of Wisconsin-Madison
http://www.engr.wisc.edu/epd/faculty/courter_sandra.html

Sandra Shaw Courter is Director of the Engineering Learning Center and a member of the Department of Engineering Professional Development, College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin – Madison.  She teaches technical communication courses to undergraduate engineering students.  As a member of the management team for the NSF Center for Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), Courter is responsible with a multi-disciplinary team for developing and teaching a graduate course about teaching and learning; she piloted the course as an online web-conference during fall 2006. Courter is currently principal investigator for an inter-disciplinary project (NSF Grant No. 0648267) related to "How People Learn Engineering."

Richard Cyr
Professor of Biology
Pennsylvania State University
http://www.bio.psu.edu/home/directory/homepages/rjc8

Richard Cyr is a Professor of Biology and the Associate Head for Undergraduate Affairs in the Biology Department at Penn State.  He has received several teaching awards at Penn State while maintaining an active research program in plant cell biology.  He has taught classes that range from freshman seminars to graduate courses in plant biology.  He has participated in many nationally sponsored workshops on undergraduate education and has organized various workshops for graduate students, post-docs, and faculty on various instructional topics.  This is the third year that he has been involved in the STEMES workshop.

Diane Ebert-May
Professor of Plant Biology
Michigan State University
http://www.plantbiology.msu.edu/faculty/faculty-research/diane-ebert-may

Diane Ebert-May is a Professor in the Department of Plant Biology at Michigan State University. She provides national leadership for promoting professional development, evaluation and improvement of faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students who actively participate in creative research about teaching and learning in the context of their discipline. Her previous work at Northern Arizona University focused on professional development of K-12 teachers and assessment of their students in science. She actively contributes to the educational initiatives of Ecological Society of America, served on the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Evaluating Undergraduate Teaching, NRC Committee on Integrating Education with Biocomplexity, is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; is on the editorial board of CBE-Life Sciences Education (American Society of Cell Biology), served as advisory board member of the National Academy of Engineering’s Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education, and is on the board of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC).

Alene Harris
Research Assistant Professor of Education
Vanderbilt University
http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/x4806.xml

Alene H. Harris, Ph.D., is a Research Assistant Professor of Education at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. She taught in Nashville, TN, for 16 years in suburban, inner-city, and private school classrooms before pursuing a Ph.D. in Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.
For three years as Research Assistant Professor of Special Education, she coordinated research involving classroom management, effective teaching, and mainstreamed students. For ten years as a Research Assistant Professor of Education she served as the Project Coordinator and National Trainer for the program COMP: Creating Conditions for Learning, where she developed both teacher- and trainer-level workshop curricula and conducted workshops with over 2,500 teachers and administrators throughout the United States and American territories.

Stacy Klein
Associate Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering
Vanderbilt University
http://frontweb.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/vuse_web/directory/facultybio.asp?FacultyID=21904

Dr. Klein has developed award-winning curricula for the VIBES program (Vanderbilt Instruction in Biomedical Engineering for Secondary Science) for secondary school teachers.  A nationally recognized, hands-on, science education program, VIBES is being used by high school and college teachers in 21 states.  Dr. Klein recently received an NSF grant for the Vanderbilt University Bioengineering Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program.  Its goals are to give teachers a broad overview of bioengineering, engage them in meaningful research experiences, help teachers take their research experiences back to their high school classrooms, disseminate instructional materials created by the RET participants, and create long-lasting relationships between the university and the participants. 

A 1991 graduate of Duke University with a B.S. in biomedical and electrical engineering, Dr. Klein received a M.S. in biomedical engineering from Drexel University in 1993 and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1996.

Karl Smith
Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor, Civil Engineering
University of Minnesota
http://www.ce.umn.edu/~smith/

Karl has been at the University of Minnesota since 1972 and is in phased retirement as Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Profess and Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research and development interests include building rigorous research capacity in engineering education; the role of cooperation in learning and design; problem formulation, modeling, and knowledge engineering; and project and knowledge management. His Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees are in Metallurgical Engineering from Michigan Technological University, 1969 & 1972, and his Ph.D. is in Education Psychology from the University of Minnesota, 1980.

He is currently Co-PI on two NSF Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT) grants – Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE) and National Center for Engineering and Technology Education (NCETE). His also Co-PI on an NSF CCLI National Dissemination grant entitled “Rigorous Research in Engineering Education: Creating a Community of Practice.”

He has written eight books including How to model it: Problem solving for the computer age (with A.M. Starfield and A.L. Bleloch), published by McGraw-Hill in 1990 (and republished by Interaction Book Company in 1994); Cooperative learning: Increasing college faculty instructional productivity (with David and Roger Johnson),  published by ASHE-ERIC Reports on Higher Education in 1991; Strategies for energizing large classes: From small groups to learning communities (with James Cooper and Jean MacGregor) published in Jossey-Bass’s New Direction for Teaching and Learning series in 2000; and Teamwork and project management, 3rd Ed. (with P.K. Imbrie) published in McGraw-Hill’s BEST Series in 2007