National Advisory Board

Nancy Cantor
Chancellor and President
Syracuse University

Nancy Cantor is the eleventh chancellor and president of Syracuse university, where she was also named Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies in The College of Arts and Sciences. She previously served as chancellor at the University of Illinois, provost and executive vice president of academic affairs at the University of Michigan, Dean of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies and chair of the department of psychology at Princeton University. She has co-authored or co-edited three books, and is the author or co-author of numerous book chapters and scientific journal articles. Dr. Cantor is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She received the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, the Woman of Achievement Award of the Anti-Defamation League and the Service Award on Behalf of the Disciplines from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Chancellor Cantor serves as chair of the board of directors of the American Association for Higher Education, and is a member of the National Advisory Board of the National Survey of Student Engagement. She has served on various advisory boards and study sections of the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council. Recently, Dr. Cantor served as a member of the Congressional Commission on Military Training and Gender-Related Issues.

Edward Clarke
Vice President of Strategic Innovations
Madison Area Technical College

Edward Clarke identifies and develops innovative programs and partnerships. He also develops new products and services, also helping MATC to implement them. Clarke serves in numerous professional and civic organizations including: the T.E.C. (Technology, Education, and Commerce) Incubator Center, Inc., Downtown Madison, Inc., the Economic Summit Council of Dane County, the Campus Community Coalition Partnership Council, and the Worksforce Development Board of South Central Wisconsin, Inc. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Iona College; his master's and doctorate degrees in physics from Clarkson University; and his master's degree in education from the University of Ottowa, Canada.

Peter Ewell
Senior Associate
National Center for Higher Education Management Systems
Boulder, CO

Dr. Ewell has authored six books and numerous articles on improving undergraduate instruction through the assessment of student outcomes. Publications include The Self-Regarding Institution: Information for Excellence and Assessing Educational Outcomes. In addition, he has prepared commissioned papers for agencies such as the Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education (authors of the report Involvement in Learning), the Education Commission of the States, the National Governors’ Association, the National Conference of State Legislators, and the National Center for Public Policy in Higher Education. In 1998 Dr. Ewell led the design team for the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and currently chairs its Technical Advisory Panel. Prior to joining NCHEMS, Dr. Ewell was Coordinator for Long-Range Planning at Governors State University. A graduate of Haverford College, he received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 1976 and was on the faculty of the University of Chicago. In addition to consulting in higher education, Dr. Ewell has been involved in program evaluation, organizational development and strategic planning for a variety of non-profit and arts organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts and six state arts agencies. In 1981 he received the National Theater Association award for Theory and Criticism.

John R. Jungck
Mead Chair of the Sciences and Professor of Biology
Beloit College

Dr. Jungck has specialized in mathematical molecular evolution, history and philosophy of biology, and science education reform. In 1986, he co-founded the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, a national consortium of college and university biology educators devoted to curricular reform across the nation. It promotes quantitative, open-ended problem solving, collaborative learning, peer review, research, and civic engagement/social responsibility. He is a Fulbright Scholar ( Thailand ), a Mina Shaughnessy Scholar, a Fellow of the National Institute of Science Education, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Richard McCray
Professor, Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences
University of Colorado-Boulder

After teaching high school physics for a few years, Dick McCray received his Ph.D. in physics from UCLA in 1967. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech (1967-68) and an Assistant Professor at the Harvard College Observatory (1968-71). In 1971, he moved to the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is now George Gamow Distinguished Professor of Astrophysics. He has held visiting positions at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (1983), Beijing University and Nanjing University (1987), the Space Telescope Science Institute (1988), Columbia University (1990), and the University of California at Berkeley (1997). In 1983 Prof. McCray was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and in 1990 he received the Dannie S. Heinemann Prize for Astrophysics of the American Physical Society. In 1989 he was elected to National Academy of Sciences. In 1996 he was appointed Concurrent Professor of Astronomy at Nanjing University. In 2002 he was awarded the NSF Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars. Prof. McCray's research is in the theory of the dynamics of the interstellar gas, theory of cosmic X-ray sources, and, most recently, the theory of Supernova 1987A. Notable contributions include: the theory of the "interstellar bubbles" that are blown in interstellar gas by the winds of hot stars; the theory of "superbubbles" (giant holes blown in the gas disks of galaxies by clusters of exploding stars); theoretical models showing how X-rays from neutron stars and black holes are converted to observed ultraviolet and optical emission spectra; and the interpretation of the evolution of the spectrum of Supernova 1987A. Prof. McCray is also engaged in observations of these phenomena with various spacecraft, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra Observatory. Currently, Prof. McCray is Chair of the NAS/NRC Committee on Undergraduate Science Education and Chair of the Astronomy Section of the NAS.

Michael T. Nettles
Vice President, Policy Evaluation and Research Center
Educational Testing Service

Michael T. Nettles is the senior research director of the Policy Evaluation and Research Center in the Research & Development Division at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, NJ, where he is also the first Edmund W. Gordon Chair for Policy Evaluation and Research. Dr. Nettles is a prominent national policy researcher on educational assessment, student performance and achievement, educational equity, and higher education finance policy.  In 1996, he became the first Executive Director of the Fredrick D. Patterson Research Institute of the College Fund, where he published the three volume African American Education Data Book series and Two Decades of Progress. Dr. Nettles also chairs the Social Justice Action Committee of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and is a member of the National Academy of Science's Board on Higher Education and the Workforce, the national advisory board of the National Survey of Student Engagement, the national advisory board of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement and the Executive Committee of the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative (NPEC). He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Education Commission of the States, where he served as a Vice Chairman, and a former member of the College Board of Trustees, where he chaired the College Board Research and Development Committee. His past positions include Professor of Education at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan, Vice President for Assessment for the University of Tennessee System, Senior Research Scientist at ETS, and Assistant Director for Academic Affairs at the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. He is a native of Nashville, Tennessee and received his B.A. in Political Science at the University of Tennessee, two Masters degrees, one in Political Science and the other in Higher Education, and a Ph.D. in Higher Education from Iowa State University.

R. Eugene Rice
Scholar in Residence, American Association for Higher Education
Washington, DC

R. Eugene Rice is Senior Scholar at the American Association of Higher Education in Washington, DC. He is working on a new field of inquiry, focusing on what we are learning about learning, and served as Director of the Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards. Before moving to AAHE, he was Vice President and Dean of the Faculty at Antioch College, and held an appointment as Professor of Sociology and Religion. Antioch is committed to being a “laboratory for democracy” and one of its primary missions is to enhance the civic and social responsibility of its students. Previous to his work at Antioch, Gene was Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation engaged in the national study of the scholarly priorities of the American professoriate and collaborating with the late Ernest Boyer on the Carnegie Report Scholarship Reconsidered. A major part of that work focuses on what is now being called “the scholarship of engagement” and is being extended through new initiatives at AAHE, such as the Ford-funded project entitled “The Engaged Campus in a Diverse Democracy: Student Learning and Faculty Work.” During the major part of his career, Gene was professor of Sociology and Religion at the University of the Pacific, where he helped initiate the first of the experimental “cluster colleges.” His teaching has always emphasized the active engagement of students in community—internships, coops, service-learning. His teaching and research focus on the sociology and ethics of the professions and the workplace, with an emphasis on the changing careers of faculty. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Elaine Seymour
Director, Ethnography and Evaluation Research
University of Colorado-Boulder

Since 1989, Elaine Seymour, a sociologist, has been Director of Ethnography & Evaluation Research, located in the Center to Advance Teaching Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The group includes both social and physical scientists whose research focuses on issues in undergraduate and graduate SMET education and careers, including evaluation of initiatives seeking to improve quality and access in these fields. The issues of women in these disciplines have been a special focus and, in 2002, Elaine received the Betty Vetter Award for Research in recognition of this work. Elaine’s best-known published work may be Talking about Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, (1997; co-authored with Nancy M. Hewitt). She is currently synthesizing findings from several initiatives into pieces on the nature and processes of change in undergraduate science education. Current work includes: a study of the career paths and conditions that govern professional success for STEM Ph.D.-holders, on the UCB campus and research that explores the nature, benefits, and costs of undergraduate research experiences as perceived by variously-situated participants and non-participants. Elaine is a British-American whose education (Keele, Glasgow, and Colorado) and career have been conducted on both sides of the Atlantic.

Karl A. Smith
Morse-Alumni Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering
University of Minnesota

Karl A. Smith is Morse-Alumni Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His principal research area is the role of collaboration and cooperation in learning and design. He has served as Co-Coordinator for the Bush Faculty Development Program for Excellence and Diversity in Teaching, and Associate Director for Education at the NSF-ERC Center for Interfacial Engineering at the University of Minnesota; as a member of the Board of Directors of the Collaboration for the Advancement of College Teaching and Learning; and as Chair of the Educational Research and Methods Division of the American Society for Engineering Education. Karl was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education in 1998, and was awarded the Chester F. Carlson Award for Innovation in Engineering Education in 2001. He has Bachelors and Masters degrees in Metallurgical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota. Karl has developed and teaches courses on building models to solve problems, civil engineering systems, and project and knowledge management. He conducts workshops on active and cooperative learning, problem formulation and modeling, project management and teamwork, and building small expert systems. Karl 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 Burgess International 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 published in McGraw-Hill’s BEST Series in 2003.

James H. Stith
Vice President, Physics Resources Center, American Institute of Physics
College Park, MD

James H. Stith is the Vice President, Physics Resources Center for the American Institute of Physics. He has oversight responsibilities for AIP's Magazine Division, the Media and Government Relations Division, the Education Division, the Center for the History of Physics, the Statistical Research Division and the Careers Division. His Doctorate in physics was earned from The Pennsylvania State University, and his Masters and Bachelors in physics were received from Virginia State University. A physics education researcher, his primary interests are in Program Evaluation, and Teacher Preparation and Enhancement. He was formerly a Professor of Physics at The Ohio State University and spent 21 years on the faculty of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has also been a Visiting Associate Professor at the United Air Force Academy, a Visiting Scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Visiting Scientist at the University of Washington, and an Associate Engineer at the Radio Cooperation of America. He is a past president of the American Association of Physics Teachers, past president of the National Society of Black Physicists, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Chartered Fellow of the National Society of Black Physicists, and a member of the Ohio Academy of Science. Additionally, he serves on a number of national and international Advisory Boards and has been awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters by his alma mater, Virginia State University.

Donald O. Straney
Dean, College of Science
California State Polytechnic University at Pomona

Donald O. Straney is Dean of Science and Professor of Biology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Desert Studies Center and the Ocean Studies Institute of the California State University System. He also serves on CORE 21, a business development organization in southern California. He is on the steering committee of the Knight Collaborative, a national consortium of colleges and universities that provides executive education programs, best practice consultation and information sharing for college and university leaders. Dr. Straney joined Cal Poly Pomona in August, 2002 after spending 23 years at Michigan State University as a faculty member of the Department of Zoology, which he chaired from 1986-95. As Assistant to the Provost for Faculty Development from 1995-2002, he oversaw programs on teaching improvement and leadership. He was a 1994-95 ACE Fellow. He has served on several review panels of the National Science Foundation, (which has also been the major source of funding for his research). An evolutionary biologist by training, Dr. Straney has studied patterns of change in a variety of organisms, most recently focusing on ants. He received a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley and both his M.S. and B.S. are from Michigan State University in Zoology.

Marilla Svinicki
Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology
The University of Texas at Austin

Marilla Svinicki began her professional life as an experimental psychologist, but was soon drawn to educational psychology because of the promise it held for improving instructional practices at all levels. She received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Colorado before going to teach at Macalester College in St. Paul. In 1973 she moved from there to Texas, where she joined a research project on computer-based education and was Director of the newly formed Center for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently she is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at UT, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in cognition and learning. Her research focuses on conditions in classes that maximize learning and motivation. She is also the editor in chief of the New Directions for Teaching and Learning series as well as a widely published author and speaker in the area of faculty development and learning at the post-secondary level.

Orlando Taylor
Vice Provost for Research and Dean of the Graduate School
Howard University

The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) has elected Orlando Taylor, Dean of the Howard University Graduate School, as its next President. In addition to serving as Vice Provost for Research and Graduate Dean, Taylor also holds a faculty position at Howard as Professor in the School of Communications. He is a member of the Board of the U.S. Department of Education’s Jacob Javits Fellowship Program. Prior to his appointment as Dean, he served in several posts at Howard, including as Executive Assistant to the President, Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the School of Communications, and Chair of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences. Before coming to Howard in 1973, Taylor was a member of the faculty of Indiana University. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University. Taylor is a former President of the National Communication Association, a member of COSSA, and Immediate Past President of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. He is a former member of the Advisory Committee of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has served on an advisory council at the National Institutes of Health. Dean Taylor is currently principal investigator on grants from NSF, the Lilly Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Much of his work focuses on increasing the number of minority Ph.D. recipients. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

George Walker
Vice President for Research and Dean of the University Graduate School
Florida International University

George E. Walker comes to Florida International University from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where for the past five years he served as senior scholar and director of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. Most of his research career was at Indiana University, where he was funded by the National Science Foundation for almost two decades. Walker is active in many of the national organizations related to graduate education and research administration. Recent positions include: chair of the Council of Graduate Schools in 1995, chair of the Midwest Association of Graduate Schools in 1996, president of the Association of American Universities (AAU)/Association of Graduate Schools in 1997, and chair of National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) Council on Research Policy and Graduate Education (CRPGE) in 1997-98. Currently, in NASULGC, he serves on the Board of Directors and on the CRPGE Executive Committee. He participated on the AAU Task Force on Graduate Education and is a member of the newly formed AAU Graduate Education Project Committee. Walker, a theoretical physicist, received his bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University, and the M.S. and Ph.D. from Case Institute of Technology.

William B. Wood
Distinguished Professor,
Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology
University of Colorado-Boulder

Earning his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Stanford University, Palo in 1963, Dr. Wood’s research interests include genetic control and molecular biology of axis formation, pattern formation, and sex determination in development of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Honors include: U.S. Steel Award in Molecular Biology (1969) election to membership of the National Academy of Sciences (1972), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975-1976), membership in thee American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976), Harvey Society Lectureship (1978), the National Institutes of Health, MERIT Award (1986-1995)< Fellow, American Association for the advancement of Science (1989), and Fellow American Academy of Microbiology (1992). From 1970 to 1972, Dr. Wood served on the National Science Foundation’s Panel for Developmental Biology. He was also on the National Institutes of Health, Physiological Chemistry Study Section from 1974-1978, the American Society Biological Chemists, Educational Affairs Committee from 1975-1978, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science and Public Policy from 1978-1979, the National Institutes of Health, Genetics Special Study Section during 1980., a Developmental Biology Gordon Conference, co-organizer in 1983, Harvard University’s Overseer's Committee to Visit the Division of Medical Sciences from 1984-1988, the National Institutes of Health, Cellular & Molecular Basis of Disease Review Committee from 1984-1988, Associate Editor for Cell from 1984-1986, Board of Reviewing Editors for Science from 1985-1992, on the Visiting Committee to the Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology since 1986, on the Visiting Committee to the Department of Embryology, Carnegie Institution of Washington since 1986, on the Editorial Board of Developmental Biology since 1995 and a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Developmental Toxicology from 1997 to 1998.

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