Vanderbilt University

Member since 2006

Program Name: CIRTL at Vanderbilt
Contact: Jean Alley, Program Administrator and Network Liaison
Biomedical Engineering - School of Engineering
5824 Science & Engineering Building
(615) 343-2766

 

Why did Vanderbilt University Join the CIRTL Network?

Vanderbilt joined the CIRTL Network because it offered a method to continue our campus focus on issues in STEM education and faculty (future and current) development.  A number of activities in STEM education were existing at Vanderbilt.  These included the Center for Teaching charged with the improvement of teaching in all undergraduate disciplines; the Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard/MIT (VaNTH) Engineering Research Center for Bioengineering Educational Technologies, a major research center in engineering education funded by NSF; the Center for Science Outreach, a effort to transfer scientific expertise from university to K-12 contexts; a  major Research Experience for Teachers program and a number of individual efforts aimed at improving STEM education.  VU faculty endorsed the CIRTL pillars and found significant overlap between them and other reforms that were underway on our campus, especially instructional reform in challenge-based instruction and applications of learning technology. VU found the CIRTL emphasis on graduate education and future faculty to be especially appealing.  In addition, the concept of a larger network was compatible with our earlier work in VaNTH and offered a venue for dissemination of VU ideas and the reception at VU of ideas in STEM education developed by the network members.

 

CIRTL Network Team

The VU CIRTL Network Team consists of the following: 

  • Director, Thomas R. Harris, Orrin Henry Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering Emeritus and Research Professor of Biomedical Engineering.
  • Alene Harris, Research Assistant Professor of Education, Assessment liaison and learning science consultant.
  • Jean Alley, Program Administrator and network liaison.

Steering Committee:

  • Allison Pingree, Director Center for Teaching
  • Keivan Stassun, Associate Professor of Physics
  • Stacy Klein, Associate Professor in the Practice of BiomedicalEngineering, Associate Dean of Engineering
  • Virginia Shepherd, Professor of Pathology
  • Kenneth Schriever, Instructor in Physics and Director of the Undergraduate    Physics Instructional Laboratories