Biographical Statements

Jennifer Aultman, doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Virginia. Ms. Aultman received her B.A. from the University of Virginia with a double-major in Environmental Science and Archaeology, and a minor in Physics. Her dissertation research in archaeology combines her interests in cultural and scientific topics; she is examining Monacan Indian landscapes of Central Virginia from AD 800-1700. In addition, Ms. Aultman has expertise in geoarchaeology and the historical archaeology and social history of the Eastern U.S. She served as Curator of Archaeological Collections at Monticello and currently works part-time at the University of Virginia Women's Center. Ms. Aultman thoroughly enjoys teaching. She has served as instructor and teaching assistant for courses ranging from archaeological field school to "Women's Lives in Myth and Reality." Ultimately, she hopes to pursue a career in teaching because she believes that education breeds understanding and tolerance as students consider how people's cultural beliefs shape their experiences in the world.

Edward L. Ayers, Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. He was educated at the University of Tennessee (B.A.) and Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. in American Studies. He has written and edited nine books, including Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (1984), which won the J. Willard Hurst Prize for best book in American legal history; The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992), which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was named the best book on the history of American race relations and on the history of the American South; In the Presence of Mine Enemies, War in the Heart of America 1859-1863 (2003), which won the Bancroft Prize in American history in 2004 and the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award for the best English-language book on the history of the US, Canada, or Latin America from 1492 to the present; The Oxford Book of the American South (1997), which he co-edited with Bradley Mittendorf; and most recently, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (2005). Dr. Ayers has won many teaching awards, including the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Virginia State Council of Higher Education, and the 2002 James Harvey Robinson Award from the American Historical Association for the best aid to the teaching of History. In November 2003, he was named the National Professor of the Year for doctoral and research universities by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Dr. Ayers pioneered in digital media with "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War." The World Wide Web version of the project has attracted over 4 million visitors. The Web and CD-ROM version (2000) won the first annual eLincoln Prize for best digital work on the era of the American Civil War. President Clinton appointed Dr. Ayers to the National Council on the Humanities in 2000. Dr. Ayers has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto (1999-2000) and has served as the Fulbright Commission’s John Adams Professor of American Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands (1995). He was named to the Board of the Council on Library and Information Resources (2002), and to the Board for the National Council for History Education (2003).

George T. Barthalmus, Professor Emeritus and interim Head, Department of Zoology at North Carolina State University. Dr. Barthalmus received a B.S. in Biology at Bloomsburg University (Pa) and both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Zoology at the Pennsylvania State University. He joined the Zoology Department at North Carolina State in 1970 and worked through the ranks to Full Professor. In 1994 he became Assistant Director of Academic Programs in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. In 1998 he became Associate Dean and Director of Academic Programs. Dr. Barthalmus retired after 31 years in June 2001, but in 2002-03 accepted an invitation to serve as Interim Director of the University Honors Program. He next oversaw the creation of a new North Carolina State Office of Undergraduate Research in 2003 and has served as Director to date. He has recently accepted the additional role of Interim Head of Zoology. He taught over 16,000 NC State students during his 36 years and won three University Outstanding Teaching Awards, the Distinguished Alumni Undergraduate Professor Award, and the Outstanding Academic Adviser Award. He was past President of Phi Kappa Phi (2000-2001), and Chair of the Academy of Outstanding Teachers. His research focused on behavioral toxicology and pharmacology. Dr. Barthalmus developed and obtained funding for the new State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research Symposium which was held in Raleigh in November 2005.

Robert A. Bjork, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Bjork received his Ph.D. in Psychololgy from Stanford University and his B.A. from the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He has served as Editor of Memory & Cognition (1981-85); Editor of Psychological Review (1995-2000); Co-editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (1998-2004), and Chair of a National Research Council Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance (1988-94). His positions of leadership include President of the American Psychological Society (APS); President of the Western Psychological Association; Chair of the Psychonomic Society; Chair of the Society of Experimental Psychologists; and Chair of the Council of Editors of the American Psychological Association (APA). He is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychological Society. He is a recipient of UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award; APA’s Distinguished Scientist Lecturer Award; and APA’s Distinguished Service to Psychological Science Award.

Robert Brown, Institute Professor of Physics, Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Brown completed a B.S. at the University of Minnesota (1963) and a Ph.D. at MIT (1968). Since joining the CWRU Physics Department in 1970, he has taught 28 different undergraduate and graduate courses and pioneered a number of successful educational methods, including creating an early electronic learning environment (highlighted in Sheila Tobias' book, Revitalizing Undergraduate Science: Why Some Things Work and Most Don't, 1992); involving undergraduates as teaching assistants, for which he was recognized in a Cornell Sloan Foundation study (1993); blending the computer skills of even very young students in a frontier study module on nonlinear science, for which he received a national award from the Department of Energy (1997); and, recently, developing a "cycling" approach to education that involves revisiting material several times during a semester. One of the first faculty researchers to receive an NSF REU grant, he has supervised upwards of 40 undergraduates, a dozen of whom have won NSF graduate fellowships; his collaborations with his undergraduates have led to 15 authored or co-authored papers. He also led the effort at CWRU to found a society for undergraduate women in science. He is currently working in Physics Education Research on issues related to “Post Exam Syndrome. He has received three CWRU awards for teaching excellence, a national AAPT teaching award (2004) and a 2006 Forman Lectureship at Vanderbilt University selection for his achievements in undergraduate education and was one of three finalists for the 2006 national Robert Foster Cherry Great Teaching Award covering all disciplines. Dr. Brown's research with graduate and undergraduate collaborators has resulted in more than 150 publications and abstracts, and six patents in a remarkably diverse area, which include MRI, electromagnetic analysis, inverse methods, rf thermal ablation and heat equation investigations, nonlinear dynamics, EEG and MEG, clinical magnetic susceptometry, muscle fatigue modeling, functional and interventional imaging, and sensor development. Dr. Brown is a Fellow of the American Physical Society through the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics. A leading MRI researcher has referred to his 900-page textbook, Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Physical Principles and Sequence Design (1999), written with his former students, as the "daily companion of the MRI scientist."

Thomas Cech, President, Howard Hughes Medical Institute. After earning a B.A. in Chemistry from Grinnell College (1970), he obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and then engaged in postdoctoral research in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1978 he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 1988 and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1990. In 1982, Dr. Cech and his research group announced that an RNA molecule from Tetrahymena, a single-celled pond organism, cut and rejoined chemical bonds in the complete absence of proteins. Thus RNA was not restricted to being a passive carrier of genetic information, but could have an active role in cellular metabolism. This discovery of self-splicing RNA provided the first exception to the long-held belief that biological reactions are always catalyzed by proteins. In addition, it has been heralded as providing a new, plausible scenario for the origin of life; because RNA can be both an information-carrying molecule and a catalyst, perhaps the first self-reproducing system consisted of RNA alone. Only years later was it recognized that RNA catalysts, or "ribozymes," might provide a new class of highly specific pharmaceutical agents, able to cleave and thereby inactivate viral RNAs or other RNAs involved in disease. Dr. Cech’s work has been recognized by many national and international awards and prizes, including the Heineken Prize of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (1988), the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1988), the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1989), and the National Medal of Science (1995). In 1987 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and also awarded a lifetime professorship by the American Cancer Society. In 2000 Dr. Cech moved to Maryland to be president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He continues research on ribozyme structure and on telomerase in his Boulder, Colorado laboratory.

G. Wayne Clough, President, Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1964 and 1965, and a Ph.D. in 1969 in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to becoming Georgia Tech’s tenth President, he was a member of the faculty at Duke University, Stanford University, Virginia Tech, and the University of Washington and served as Head of the Department of Civil Engineering and Dean of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, and as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Washington. Dr. Clough's interests include technology and higher education policy, economic development, diversity in higher education, and technology in a global setting. Under his leadership, Georgia Tech’s achievements have been noteworthy. They range from doubling research expenditures and obtaining over $1 billion in private gifts to implementing a state-wide regional engineering program. In 1999, the Georgia Tech received the Hesburgh Award, the nation’s top recognition for support of undergraduate teaching and learning. It is ranked among the top ten public universities by U.S. News and World Report, and Black Issues in Higher Education cites Georgia Tech as the top producer of African-American engineers.

Dr. Clough has been recognized for his teaching and research, which is in geotechnical and earthquake engineering. He has published over 120 papers and reports and six book chapters. His honors include: Election to the National Academy of Engineering (1990); nine national awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers, including the 2004 OPAL lifetime award for contributions to education; the George Westinghouse Award for outstanding teaching and research from the American Society of Engineering Education (1986); the 2002 National Engineering Award given by the American Association of Engineering Societies; and being named Distinguished Alumnus from the College of Engineering at U.C. Berkeley (2004). He is one of a handful of civil engineers to have been twice awarded Civil Engineering’s oldest recognition, the Norman Medal, in 1982 and in 1996.

Dr. Clough is active in national and local professional and volunteer service. He is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (since 2001) and the National Science Board (since 2004). His other service includes his work as: Vice Chair of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, Co-chair of the Council’s 2004 National Innovation Initiative, Chair of the National Academies Committee on New Orleans Regional Hurricane Protection Projects, Chair of The Engineer of 2020 Project for the NAE, Member of the Executive Committee of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and Trustee of Georgia Research Alliance. He serves on the Board of Advisors for Noro-Moseley Partners, a venture capital firm, and on the Board of Directors of TSYS of Columbus, Georgia, and he is a special consultant to the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit System for ongoing major seismic retrofit operations.

Elizabeth Dupuis, Associate University Librarian for Educational Initiatives and Director, Doe/Moffitt Libraries at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her B.A and MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to assuming her present position, she was Head of the Digital Information Literacy Office at the University of Texas at Austin and project manager for the award-winning educational site, TILT. She serves on committees for organizations such as the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Institute for Information Literacy, and was recognized as a 2004-2006 Research Library Leadership Fellow by the Association of Research Libraries. She is currently the Project Director for the Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship on Undergraduate Research at Berkeley.

Christa Erickson, Associate Professor of Art and Digital Studios Director at Stony Brook University. She is also an affiliate in Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies. Ms. Erickson is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the politics, pleasures, and pains of spaces mediated by electronic technologies. Her individual and collaborative works have been exhibited widely both within the United States and abroad. Sites within the United States where her work has been shown include the PPOW, Jamaica Center for the Arts, Visual Arts Museum, and School for Visual Arts in New York City; the Walker Art Center in Minnesota; the Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University; the California Museum of Photography; and Maryland Art Place, as well as several university galleries and museums. Internationally, she has had exhibits at the Banff Center for the Arts and the Hong Kong Arts Centre and at international media arts festivals like CYNETart (Germany), Maid in Cyberspace (Canada), FILE (Brazil), Medi@terra (Greece and Eastern Europe), and Ciber@rt (Spain). Recently she was Artist-in-Residence at the Hong Kong Arts Centre for Digital Now 2003 and an Artist-in-Residence at Sculpture Space 2006-7. She also writes, curates, and regularly speaks about new media. Her essay "Networked Interventions: Debugging the Electronic Frontier" appears in the anthology Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Urban Metropolis (Routledge, 2002). She teaches electronic media courses and a collaborative multi-media sequence with a composer from Stony Brook’s Department of Music and has received a Presidential Mini-Grant for Innovative Teaching. Her background includes commercial design, media production, and programming experience. Ms. Erickson has an MFA from the University of California, San Diego and degrees in sculpture and computer science from the University of Texas, Austin. Prior to joining the faculty at Stony Brook, she taught at UC, San Diego and at Indiana University, where she founded the University’s Digital Media program.

Stephen L. Esquith, Professor of Philosophy and acting Dean of the College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. A graduate of Harvard College, Dr. Esquith did his doctoral work in the Department of Politics and Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton University. He has been working on ethical problems in developing countries since 1990 when he was a senior Fulbright Scholar in Poland. His primary scholarly work is Intimacy and Spectacle (Cornell, 1994), a critique of classical and modern liberal political philosophy. While in Poland he collaborated on two collections of essays written by Polish and U.S. scholars on the changes in Eastern Europe since 1989. His research and teaching since that time has focused on democratic transitions in post-authoritarian countries. He has written on the rule of law, the problem of democratic political education, mass violence and reconciliation, and moral and political responsibility. He has also been involved in numerous civic engagement projects in the public schools, most recently an exchange program between local elementary school children in the U.S. and schoolchildren in a community school in Kati, Mali. He has led a study abroad program focusing on ethical issues in development in Mali in summer 2004, and he is spending the academic year 2005-06 working with colleagues at the University of Bamako as a senior Fulbright Scholar and teaching two seminars on ethics and development at the Institute Polytechnic Rural and the Institut Supérieure de Formation et de Recherche Appliquée. He is currently finishing a book on mass violence and democratic political education entitled From Bystanders to Citizens: Mass Violence and Democratic Political Education. A chair of the Department of Philosophy for the last five years, in the fall 2006 Dr. Esquith will assume the position of Dean of Michigan State’s new Residential College in the Arts and Humanities.

Ellen Fanning, Stevenson Professor of Molecular Biology and Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Fanning completed a B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1968), and both Diplom (1974) and Dr. rer. nat. in Genetics at the University of Cologne, Germany (1977). She joined the biology faculty at the University of Konstanz, moved to the University of Munich as Associate Professor of Biochemistry in 1981, and to her current position at Vanderbilt in 1995. Her research focuses on virus-host cell interactions and the structure and function of DNA metabolizing proteins, and she teaches undergraduate biochemistry and virology. She served on the editorial board of the Journal of Virology for 20 years and is currently on the board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Since she began mentoring research students at the University of Konstanz, more than 60 undergraduates and more than 30 graduate students have completed their thesis work in her lab and moved on to faculty positions in Germany and the US, and to other professions in academia, industry, and government. Her HHMI program, the Community of Scholars, is dedicated to integrating undergraduates beginning as freshmen into a culture of research and mentoring, in a community of more experienced undergraduates, graduate and postdoctoral trainees, and faculty from different disciplines who pursue overlapping research interests and teach each other. The Community of Scholars works closely with the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching in program development, mentor training, assessment, and adaptation of program elements to other settings on campus.

Cassandra L. Fraser, Professor of Chemistry and the Cavaliers’ Distinguished Teaching Professor (2004-06) at the University of Virginia. In research, teaching, and service activities, she is especially keen on exploring and building connections between disciplines, cultures, and sectors of society. She earned her undergraduate degree at Kalamazoo College (1984), where she first studied chemistry and art, and later devised her own major, crossing theology, political philosophy and women’s studies. After college she pursued a Master of Theological Studies degree at Harvard Divinity School (1988) and worked in cell biology and toxicology laboratories while there. Later, she resumed her studies in chemistry, earning a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at The University of Chicago (1993) with B. Bosnich, followed by postdoctoral research in organometallic and polymer chemistry at Caltech (1993-95) with R. H. Grubbs, a 2005 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. She began her academic career at UVA in 1995, where she has made history as the first woman scientist to receive tenure and promotion to full professor in the Chemistry Department. Research in the Fraser Group is concerned with the design and synthesis of metallobiomaterials, including investigation of their responsive and nanoscale assembly properties with collaborators. Themes of interest include cancer drug delivery, biodegradable and biocompatible materials, green chemistry, and ways in which cultural perspectives shape our understanding as stewards (or exploiters) of resources, from molecular to global scales. Work in the Fraser laboratory has been recognized by the National Science Foundation, the White House, Dupont, 3M, the Sloan Foundation and other agencies. Devising new learning experiences for students, challenging them to explore the world in new ways, and encouraging appreciation of the importance of their roles, rank among Prof. Fraser’s most rewarding activities. Courses she has taught include honors organic chemistry (1996-05) and graduate transition metal chemistry (1996-98). Interdisciplinary educational projects include the Science, Careers and Society Forum (1998-present), the Echols seminar “Color: Across the Spectrum” (2000), and the Dean’s Office supported Biomaterials Workshop, featuring many prominent speakers and participants from Arts and Sciences, Engineering and Medical Schools (2001-03). Most recently, she organized and led the Designing Matter Common Course (2004-05), part of the Carnegie funded Teachers for a New Era initiative, involving student, faculty and community participants from many fields. Dr. Fraser has served the university and scientific community in a variety of ways as a member of the UVA Faculty of Arts and Sciences Steering Committee, the Morphogenesis and Regenerative Medicine Scientific Planning Committee, the Editorial Advisory Board for Macromolecules, and the NIH Gene and Drug Delivery Study Section among many other activities.

Katherine L. Friedman, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Friedman completed her B.A. at Carleton College in 1990 and her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Washington in Seattle, and did post-doctoral work with Dr. Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She joined the Vanderbilt faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2001. Dr. Friedman has a long-standing interest in DNA replication and uses the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model organism to study replication of chromosome ends, or telomeres. She teaches Introductory and Advanced Molecular Genetics to undergraduate and graduate students and was honored as "Graduate Teacher of the Year" by students of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program at Vanderbilt University. For the past several years, Dr. Friedman has served as co-director of an undergraduate research program (Community of Scholars) funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to HHMI Professor Ellen Fanning.The Community of Scholars introduces rising sophomores to the excitement and rigors of independent research in the context of a supportive team of scientists at many different stages of their careers. The Community fosters an emphasis on teaching and mentoring in a close collaboration with the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching.

Robert J. Full, Chancellor’s and Goldman Professor and Director of the PolyPEDAL Laboratory and of CIBER, Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Full has led a focused international effort to demonstrate the value of integrative biology and biological inspiration through the formation of fourteen interdisciplinary collaborations and five new design teams composed of biologists, engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists from academia and industry. His fundamental discoveries in animal locomotion have inspired the design of novel neural control circuits, artificial muscles, eight autonomous legged robots, and the first self-cleaning dry adhesive. The recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator Award (1990), he has authored over 200 contributions and has delivered an equal number of national and international presentations. To further his efforts, he has recently created the Center for Interdisciplinary Biological Inspiration in Education and Research (CIBER) at Berkeley that focuses on training the next generation of scientists and engineers to collaborate in mutually beneficial relationships. In 1996 Dr. Full was given Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award for his work involving undergraduate teaching and research. He has mentored over 90 undergraduate researchers who have received more than 50 awards/fellowships, and undergraduates from his laboratory have won one or both of the most distinguished awards in Integrative Biology at Berkeley twelve times. His students have given over 40 research presentations at national and international meetings, and co-authored twenty-five journals articles, five Proceedings papers, and over 60 abstracts. Dr. Full has redesigned his courses using an interdisciplinary, research-based approach. For these efforts and his participation in the Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology, he recently was named Mentor in the Life Sciences by the National Academy of Sciences.

William J. Gehring, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Gehring received an A.B. in Psychology from Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive-Experimental Psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. His research interests in cognitive neuroscience include human brain electrical activity related to detecting performance errors and other negative events. Current projects include studies of brain dysfunctions in obsessive-compulsive disorder and neural activity associated with monetary losses in simple gambling tasks. Dr. Gehring has served on the advisory board to the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, and he is currently a member of the College of Literature, Arts and Sciences Information Technology Committee. In 2004 he was awarded an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education.

Gail Giebink, Director of Foundation Relations in the Office of the Vice President for Development at the University of Texas at Austin. In this capacity, she builds relationships with private foundations and works with colleges and schools across the University to identify and respond to funding opportunities. Over 27 years at UT she has worked in a series of administrative and development positions, focusing on foundation relations for the past seven years. During that time UT completed a $1 billion capital campaign, surpassing its goal by $600 million and including $217 million in foundation funding. Ms. Giebink received a B.A. in Spanish (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Middlebury College in Vermont and a B.A. in Journalism from Eastern Washington University.

Lucia Albino Gilbert, Professor and Provost, Santa Clara University. Dr. Gilbert is a preeminent scholar in the field of gender studies and career development and the recipient of awards for teaching and research excellence. The author of four books and numerous articles on dual-earner families and gender processes in counseling and psychotherapy. She is currently doing research on gender and technology. As Vice Provost, she focuses mainly on undergraduate education and interdisciplinary initiatives. She directs Connexus: Connections in Undergraduate Studies, established under her direction in June 2000, to enhance the undergraduate experience at UT Austin. Dr. Gilbert received her bachelor's degree from Wells College and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

William Scott Green, Professor of Religious Studies, Senior Vice Provost, and Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of Miami. Until July 1, 2006, he was Professor of Religion and Dean of the College at the University of Rochester, where he founded the popular Department of Religion and Classics in 1983, led in developing Rochester's undergraduate curriculum, and was Director of Rochester's university-wide Center for Entrepreneurship. Dr. Green writes on religion, ancient Judaism, and higher education, and has served on the board of the Association of American Colleges, the chief academic organization for promoting liberal education. He is currently collaborating with David Sloan Wilson on a research project on religion and social evolution. He teaches courses in religion and in entrepreneurship. Dr. Green earned an A.B. in religion at Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in religion from Brown University. He is a member of the Reinvention Center Executive Board.

Rosemary R. Haggett, Deputy Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources (EHR) at the National Science Foundation. In this position, she is responsible for working with the agency’s Assistant Director in the formulation of policies and programs connected with the management of the EHR Directorate’s $800+ million portfolio of activities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. Previously, she was Division Director for Undergraduate Education in the EHR Directorate from 2003 to 2005. Dr. Haggett came to the NSF from West Virginia University where she served as Associate Provost for Academic Programs from 1999 to 2003, and Dean of the College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Consumer Sciences (one of the first women in the country to so serve) from 1994 to 1999. She continues to hold the rank of Professor in the University’s Division of Animal and Veterinary Sciences. Dr. Haggett holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology from the University of Bridgeport, and a Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Virginia.

Joseph Harris, Director of the University Writing Program at Duke University. Dr. Harris also teaches courses in academic writing, critical reading, literature and social class, writing pedagogy, and images of teaching in fiction and film. He is the author of Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (Utah State UP, 2006), A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 (Prentice Hall, 1997), and numerous articles on teaching writing and administering university writing programs. From 1994-99, he served as editor of CCC: College Composition and Communication. In 2006, the Duke UWP was awarded the CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence. For more about the Duke UWP, see http://uwp.aas.duke.edu/. Dr. Harris received his B.A. from Haverford College and his Ph.D. from New York University.

David J. Helfand, Professor and Chair of Astronomy and Co-Director, Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory at Columbia University. Dr. Helfand received his A.B. from Amherst College and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Massachusetts. He has spent most of his professional life at Columbia, taking a break in 1998-1999 to go to the University of Cambridge where he was Sackler Distinguished Visiting Astronomer. His work has covered many areas of modern astrophysics including radio, optical, and X-ray observations of celestial sources ranging from nearby stars to the most distant quasars. He is currently involved in a major project to survey the Galaxy with a sensitivity and angular resolution a hundred times greater than currently available using the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico. The goal is to obtain a complete picture of birth and death (for stars) in the Milky Way. Dr. Helfand teaches primarily undergraduate courses for non-science majors, including one of his own design which treats the atom as a tool for revealing the quantitative history of everything from human diet and works of art to the Earth's climate and the Universe. He also recently implemented a vision he began working on in 1982 that has all Columbia freshmen taking a science course as part of Columbia's famed Core Curriculum. He received the 2001 Presidential Teaching Award and the 2002 Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates, and in having returned from a year as at the University of Cambridge. Several years ago, he appeared weekly on the Discovery Channel's program “Science News,” bringing the latest astronomical discoveries to the US television audience. More recently, his television appearances have been limited to more serious matters on Comedy Central's The Daily Show. He serves on far too many University, government, and American Astronomical Society committees for his own (or anyone else's) good. He believes he is a better cook than astronomer and, ambiguously, most of his colleagues who have sampled his gastronomical undertakings agree.

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Associate Professor of Library Administration, Head of the Undergraduate Library, and library-wide Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also a member of the Association of College and Research Libraries' Information Literacy Institute Immersion faculty and has taught courses at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, both in-person and online, and undergraduate courses in critical thinking at Illinois State University and Parkland College. Her scholarly interests include library service innovations, student learning and information literacy, and education and professional development for academic librarians. She has master's degrees in library science and educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

Ron Hoy, David and Dorothy Merksamer Professor of Biology at Cornell University. He is also a professor and former chairman in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior and former co-director of Cornell’s Cognitive Studies Program. An authority in animal biocommunication with a specialty in bioacoustics. Dr. Hoy has published over a dozen papers in Science and Nature on his research. He has long been interested in bringing primary research experiences to undergraduates and directed the development of an NSF-sponsored CD-ROM-based neurophysiology laboratory, “Crawdad,” published by Sinauer Associates. Sinauer has also just published “PsyCog: Explorations in Perception and Cognition,” a set of student explorations based on visual and auditory illusions. His work in undergraduate curriculum development in the biological sciences was recognized by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, through its Professors Program. His HHMI projects include DVD-based modular laboratory modules for cell biology, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering that are genuine research-based activities, and multimedia signal analysis software that can be used to teach the physics and psychoacoustics of sound, including music, to students in biology, physical sciences, engineering, and in the humanities.

Robert Hummer, Professor and Chair of Sociology and Research Associate of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Hummer received his B.A. from Adrian College in Michigan and his PhD from Florida State University. His work, which is supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and National Science Foundation, examines racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious differences in health and mortality across the life span. He has authored or co-authored some 50 publications, including Living and Dying in the U.S.A.: Behavioral, Health, and Social Differentials in Adult Mortality (with R. Rogers and C. Nam, 2000), which won the 2002 Otis Dudley Duncan Award from the Population Section, American Sociological Association, and "Religious Involvement and U.S. Adult Mortality," (with R. Rogers, C. Nam, and C. Ellison in Demography, 1999), which received the Outstanding Paper Award in Humility Theology in the Category of Religion and the Medical Sciences, from the John Templeton Foundation. Dr. Hummer leads an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates Program on the topic of Minority Group Demography at the University of Texas and is also principal investigator of an NSF grant to improve the recruitment and retention of students from under-represented minority groups into graduate programs in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences.

Christopher Impey, University Distinguished Professor and Academic Head of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. As Academic Head, he runs the nation's largest undergraduate majors program in astronomy and the second largest Ph.D. program. His research interests are in observational cosmology, gravitational lensing, and the evolution and structure of galaxies. He has 140+ refereed publications and 50 published conference proceedings and has received more than $10 million in grants from NASA and the NSF in support of his research, which includes 24 projects given time on the Hubble Space Telescope. As a professor, Dr. Impey has taught astronomy to over 4500 students and won eleven teaching awards at the University of Arizona. He has pioneered curriculum development in astrobiology, and is PI on a major three-year grant from the Templeton Foundation to explore issues at the interface of science and religion. Working with the planetary scientist Bill Hartmann, he has co-authored two successful introductory textbooks and 20+ popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology. He is the creator of the Astronomica web site, which supports 1000 students a semester with interactive tools and frontier instructional technology. His web design and curriculum projects have been supported by NASA and the NSF. Dr. Impey has been a Shapley Lecturer for the American Astronomical Society for ten years and is currently Vice President of the American Astronomical Society, serving on its Executive Council and its Astronomy Education Board. He was named a Galileo Circle Scholar, the U of A College of Science's highest honor, in 2005, and in 2002 was recognized as Arizona Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Council for the Improvement of Teaching, and was selected as one of six Distinguished Teaching Scholars by the NSF. This year he is a lecturer in the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program.

Darcy B. Kelley, Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She received her A.B. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from the Rockefeller University where she was Assistant Professor before joining the faculty of Princeton University. In 1981 she moved to Columbia as Associate Professor. The work of her research group focuses on the neurobiology and evolution of vocal communication in South African clawed frogs with approaches ranging from field studies in Cape Town, Gabon and Cameroon to molecular genetics in the laboratory at Columbia. In 2002 Dr. Kelley was named Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, an award that acknowledges an effort of Columbia’s Science faculty to establish a new core course for all entering College students, Frontiers of Science. Among her awards are the Jacob Javits Award for Neuroscience Research from the National Institutes of Health and the Grass Lectureships at the Marine Biological Laboratory where she is a Trustee. Dr. Kelley has served as a scientific advisor to the Sloan and Fairchild Foundations. She is also a Trustee of the Wenner Gren Foundation for research in anthropology.

Jennifer Klimas, Research Director at the University of North Carolina, the general administration for the 16-institution University of North Carolina (UNC) system. In this role, Ms. Klimas serves as the chair of the UNC Undergraduate Research Consortium (URC), an organization made up of faculty and administrators from each of the constituent UNC institutions, who work together to support and promote high-quality undergraduate research, creative work, and inquiry-based learning in all fields of study. Since its inception in 2001, this group has held two successful “Research in the Capital” events to showcase original undergraduate research projects and discuss their importance with North Carolina legislators. The URC has also partnered with faculty and students from the North Carolina Community College System, as well as industry representatives throughout North Carolina, to exchange ideas for new inquiry-based models of undergraduate research and education that will inclusive of all students and better prepare them to participate in the industries of our state. Ms. Klimas received a B.A. in Journalism at Gonzaga University in Washington and a Masters of Library Science at the University of Maryland at College Park.

John S. Lamancusa, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Learning Factory at Penn State University. Dr. Lamancusa received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, with a minor in electrical and computer engineering, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1982) and his B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Daytonn (1978). His areas of academic research and industrial consulting include engineering education, mechanical design, design optimization, design for manufacture, noise and vibration control, musical acoustics, and mechatronics. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 1984, Dr. Lamancusa worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the areas of electronic packaging, product design for automation, and acoustic design of telecommunications equipment, and at the Reliance Electric Company, where he was involved in design, dynamic analysis and testing of electric motors and rotating machinery. He was also an adjunct faculty member at the Stevens Institute of Technology (1983), where he initiated and taught the Institute’s first graduate course in robotics. At Penn State, he teaches courses in mechanical design, vibrations, noise control, modal analysis, robotics, product dissection, mechatronics, and supervises industry design projects. Dr. Lamancusa is a Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, a member of ASME, ASEE and INCE, and a registered professional engineer in Wisconsin. His awards include the Boeing Outstanding Educator Award (1998), Penn State Engineering Society Premier Teaching Award (1999), and ASEE Fred Merryfield Design Award (2004).

Gregory Light, Associate Professor in the School of Education and Social Policy and Director of the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. He came to Northwestern in 2000 from the University of London (UK) where he was deputy head of the Lifelong Learning Group at the Institute of Education. He teaches graduate courses in higher and professional education and has consulted across the higher and professional education sector in the USA, Canada and the UK. His research and scholarship focus on the theory and practice of learning and teaching in higher and professional education. Current research projects and publications focus on student learning and the professional development of teaching in higher education. He is author of the recent book Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: The Reflective Professional (London: Sage, March 2001). Dr. Light earned his B.A. and a Specialist degree in Philosophy, at the University of Toronto. He did his Ph.D. work in Education at the University of London.

Raymond Malewitz, doctoral candidate in American Literature at the University of Virginia. Mr. Malewitz is interested in the manifold intersections amongst science, culture and literature during the twentieth century. He earned his B.S. (Honors) at the University of Michigan in both English and Biochemistry, and worked for several organic chemistry and environmental engineering research laboratories while in attendance and after graduation. He was an I.B. Chemistry teacher for two years for the Awty International School in Houston, Texas before matriculating at the University of Virginia. Since his arrival at UVA, he has taught a variety of courses ranging in subject matter from twentieth-century American documentary art to cultural studies work on the concepts of evolution, entropy and modernity. Recently, he was recognized with an English Department teaching award. He is completing a dissertation designed to provide both a working context for and extended definition of emergent cybernetic literature.

Veronica Makowsky, Professor of English and Women’s Studies and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Regional Campus Administration at the University of Connecticut. She previously served as Associate Dean for Humanities, Social Sciences and Undergraduate Education in UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She has published books and articles on southern literature and American women’s literature, and served for six years as editor of MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States). Dr. Makowsky earned her B.A. at Connecticut College and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton University.

Janet Metcalfe, Professor of Psychology and of Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University. Dr. Metcalfe received her Ph.D. in 1982 from the University of Toronto, where she also earned her masters and two bachelor degrees. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia in 1995, she was a Professor of Psychology at Dartmouth. She also held faculty positions at Indiana University, where she received an Outstanding Young Faculty Award (1988), and the University of British Columbia. Dr. Metcalfe’s research, which has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and James S. McDonnell Foundation, focuses on the cognitive, mathematical, and biological aspects of psychology, with a specialization in metacognition. Her work on metacognitive judgments in problem solving has influenced the theory of creativity in problem solving. She has published more than 50 articles in her field, and is the co-editor of Metacognition: Knowing about Knowing (1996; with A. P. Shimamura) and The Missing Link in Cognition: Origins of Self-Reflective Consciousness (2005; with H. S. Terrace). She serves on the editorial board of the Psychological Review, Psychological Bulletin, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. In 2004, Dr. Metcalfe was named a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

James Moeser, Chancellor and Professor of Music at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Bachelor of Music degree (1961) and his Master of Music in musicology (1964) from the University of Texas at Austin, which honored him with its 2001 Outstanding Alumnus Award, and earned his doctorate (1967) from the University of Michigan. Before his appointment as UNC’s ninth chancellor, he was Chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for four years. As Chancellor, Dr. Moeser has strongly emphasized University efforts to strengthen its connections with the lives of North Carolinians and their communities. He helped champion the successful passage of the nation’s largest bond referendum for higher education, which benefits the UNC System and North Carolina’s community colleges. He also established the Carolina Covenant, a first for a major public U.S. university to increase access to the university by making a UNC education possible debt-free for low-income students. An organist and past president of the American Guild of Organists, Dr. Moeser has performed widely as a concert organist. He studied in Berlin and Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship. He began his academic career in 1966 at the University of Kansas as Assistant Professor and Chairman of the organ department. He is a former Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas and of Arts and Architecture at The Pennsylvania State University, where he was also executive director of University Arts Services. He also was Provost at the University of South Carolina. He is a member of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which includes presidents and chancellors of prominent U.S. universities; serves on the Board of Directors of the National Merit Scholarship Corp.; is on two Association of American University committees examining the cost of research and internationalization; is on the CEO Group of Six, made up of university presidents and chancellors from each of the nation’s major athletic conferences; and was named a member of the NCAA’s Presidential Task Force on the Future of Division I Intercollegiate Athletics, serving on its fiscal responsibility subcommittee. Dr. Moeser’s publications and recordings have focused on organ-related topics and recitals. He has delivered invited papers and lectures for organizations ranging from the Annual Pan Pacific Business Conference to the National Association of Performing Arts Presenters to the American Guild of Organists.

Cary A. Moskovitz, Director of Writing in the Disciplines at Duke University. Dr. Moskovitz received a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from North Carolina State University, and a Masters of Architecture from Virginia Tech. He has served on the faculties of Virginia Tech, Westbrook College, and the University of New England, and served for four years as a Mellon Fellow in the University Writing Program at Duke. Dr. Moskovitz has published in journals of composition, engineering, and mathematics education and has taught undergraduate courses in academic writing, architecture, engineering mechanics, mathematics, physics, and “Science, Technology and Society.” His recent writing courses have taken up scientific controversies in diet and nutrition and automobile safety. His current research interests include “Writing Across the Curriculum” and writing pedagogy. In 2003, Dr. Moskovitz received the Duke University Award for Excellence in Teaching Writing.

Carol Muller, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Muller Co-Chairs the Faculty Committee on Community Arts at Penn. She currently teaches several classes that incorporate an Arts, Spirituality, and Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) focus into their structure. This teaching includes work with contemporary and historical research into Philadelphia's gospel and jazz communities, and a new project working with a predominantly African American Islamic school and mosque--looking at the often contested relationship between music, spirituality, and youth needs. Dr. Muller earned her B.A. in ethnomusicology from Natal University in South Africa and her Ph.D. from New York University. Her publication is focused on her work in South Africa and its diaspora, with two books: Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women's Performance in South Africa (Chicago 1999), South African Music: A Century of Traditions in Transformation (ABC-CLIO, 2004), and two books in process, Musical Echoes (forthcoming from Duke), and Musically Connected: An Introduction to World Music (forthcoming from Oxford); numerous journal articles and review. Dr. Muller is a seasoned gumboot dancer and loves to teach others this migrant worker dance form from South Africa.

Isabel Nazario, Associate Vice President for Academic and Public Partnerships in the Arts and Humanities at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She was appointed to this newly created university-wide office in September 2004 after serving as founding director of the Rutgers’ Center for Latino Arts and Culture, and executive director of the Office for Intercultural Initiatives. As Associate Vice President, Dr. Nazario is responsible for developing and supporting faculty-led co-curricular arts and humanities projects, community-service learning programs, and public scholarship initiatives that lead to innovative partnerships between Rutgers and local, state, national, and international organizations. Programs under her charge include the Bildner Faculty Fellows Diversity Project, the Transcultural New Jersey Arts and Education Initiative, the Rutgers Undergraduate Research Fellows, the Transcultural New Jersey Public Service Art Program. In partnership with the Institute for Arts and Humanities Education, she co-directs the Community Artists Training Series, a statewide artists-residency program. Before coming to Rutgers in 1992, Dr. Nazario held positions at the New York State Council on the Arts, CUNY, Queens College, and Hunter College. She developed Queens College’s first courses on Latin American and Caribbean art history for the Art History and Puerto Rican Studies Departments; at Rutgers, she developed and taught a course on Latin American Art History through the Latin American Studies Program, and co-taught a new course in the Visual Arts Department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts entitled, "The Response of the Creative Mind to Gender, Race, Class and Identity," funded through a Rutgers Dialogues grant.

Kent Norman, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland. He received his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1973 in Experimental Psychology. A member of the Cognitive Area within the Department, he is also the director of the Laboratory for Automation Psychology and Decision Processes (LAPDP, http://lap.umd.edu) and a founding member of the Human/Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL, http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil) in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. His research is on judgment and decision-making and problem solving, particularly as they pertain to human/computer interaction and cognitive issues in interface design. Dr. Norman is the developer of HyperCourseware™, a Web-based prototype. This work is reported in his online text: The Switched On Classroom (1999, http://lap.umd.edu/soc). He is currently doing research on “Computer Rage.” Dr. Norman is the author or co-author of over 80 journal articles and book chapters and is a Lilly Teaching Fellow.

Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies and of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He has a Laurea in Philosophy from the University of Florence and a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Rutgers University. Dr. Riva is the author of three books and numerous essays on topics ranging from Medieval and early Modern to Contemporary Italian Literature, including several articles (in both Italian and English) on the application of computing to the studying and teaching of Literature. His engagement with information technology in both teaching and research has led to the creation of several award winning online projects, such as The Decameron Web, supported by two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1999-2002). Most recently, he and his collaborators were awarded a grant for the creation of a Virtual Humanities Lab @ Brown University (2004-06). Dr. Riva is currently completing a book tentatively entitled: A Single Art and Science. Reinventing the Humanities in the Digital Age (©M.Riva, 2006).

Victoria Robinson, Lecturer in the Ethnic Studies and Academic Coordinator of the American Cultures Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Robinson holds a Ph.D. in Political Geography from the University of London and a B.A. in geography and international relations from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. She also did post-doctoral work in Comparative Migration Systems at Oxford University, where she studied the new migrations of women from Africa and Asia to Southern Europe. In 2003-04, she was awarded a Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship to redesign Ethnic Studies 21AC "A Comparative Survey of Racial and Ethnic Groups in the United States" to include a library research component. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship on Undergraduate Research at Berkeley.

Sharon V. Salinger, Professor of History and Dean, Division of Undergraduate Education at University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining the Irvine faculty in 2005, Dr. Salinger was at UC Riverside where she held a number of administrative positions including associate dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, interim director of the Center for Ideas and Society, and chair of the Department of History. While at UC Riverside, she received the University’s distinguished teaching award. Dr. Salinger's research and teaching specialties focus on early American cultural and social history. In addition to an edited volume and numerous articles, she has authored two books, To Serve Well and Faithfully (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). She is currently working with Cornelia Dayton on a book-length study of "warning out" in eighteenth-century Boston, a colonial legal practice designed to identify non-residents of New England towns. Dr. Salinger received her bachelor's and doctoral degrees in history from UCLA.

Cynthia Schrager, Special Assistant to the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her B.A. in English from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She taught briefly as a Lecturer in the Literature Board at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1997, she returned to Berkeley as a staff member in the Office of Undergraduate Research to serve as the first program coordinator for the Robert & Colleen Haas Scholars Program, a new interdisciplinary undergraduate research program. Since assuming her current position in 2001, she has served working on a wide variety of undergraduate education program and policy issues. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship on Undergraduate Research at Berkeley.

Tim Stearns, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and Genetics at Stanford University. Dr. Stearns received his B.S. degree in genetics at Cornell University and his Ph.D. in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-San Francisco. His research focuses on the microtubule cytoskeleton, a critical component of the eukaryotic cell, and makes use of several model systems, including human and mouse cells, frog eggs, and yeast cells. His lab has also developed genomic methods for revealing the mechanisms of environmental toxins and pollutants. In addition to his research, Dr. Stearns received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor Awards in recognition of his teaching accomplishments and has received both the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the School of Medicine Award for Graduate Teaching at Stanford.

Pauline Turner Strong, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Folklore and Public Culture, and of Women's & Gender Studies at The University of Texas, Austin. An award-winning undergraduate and graduate teacher, Dr. Strong has participated in the development of many interdisciplinary initiatives, including those of Connexus: Connections in Undergraduate Education, and the University of Texas Humanities Institute, which she will serve as Associate Director beginning in 2007. Dr. Strong's research centers on the representation of race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality in U.S. public culture. She is the author of Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives (1999), which won an Honorable Mention for the Chicago Folklore Prize, and is co-editor of New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, Representations (2006). She has also curated five museum exhibits, and published 26 articles in the fields of anthropology, folklore, ethnohistory, cultural studies, museum studies, gender studies, American Studies, and Native American Studies. She has served as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and Councilor of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Dr. Strong received her bachelor's degree in philosophy from Colorado College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Patricia A. Turner, Professor of African-American Studies and American Studies and Interim Dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985, she taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston until 1990 when she joined the faculty at UC Davis. At UC Davis, she was appointed Vice Provost of Undergraduate Studies in 1999 and since 2004 has been serving as Interim Dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in the College of Letters and Science. Dr. Turner has been a consulting scholar on several documentary film projects, including Marlon Rigg’s Ethnic Notions, which received an Emmy award in 1989 for best research in a documentary, and his 1992 Peabody-award winning film Color Adjustment. She has written many reviews, editorials and articles and is the author of three books: I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (1993), Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (1994, reissued 2002), and Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America, with Gary Alan Fine (2001). I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture was named as Outstanding book on the subject of human rights in North America by the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights (1995); it also inspired a story on ABC’s 20/20. A sought-after commentator on issues related to folklore and popular culture, Dr. Turner has appeared on the NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, and All Things Considered, and she has been interviewed for stories in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and other publications. She is currently working on a book on African-American quilters, as well as one on the multitude of cultures that have settled on the eastern end of New York’s Long Island.

Gabriela C. Weaver, Associate Professor of Chemistry, Director of the Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education at Purdue University. Dr. Weaver received her B.S. in Chemistry in 1989 from the California Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. in Chemical Physics in 1994 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, working with Steve Leone. Before coming to Purdue in 2001, she served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Colorado at Denver from 1994 to 2001. During that time she shifted the focus of her research work from physical chemistry to educational research and the development of instructional technologies. She has been a co-author on two different chemistry textbooks. She has also been the leader in several projects to develop instructional technologies including DVDs, websites and videogames for teaching chemistry. She has been an invited speaker at over 30 national and international meetings, including the Gordon Conference on Chemical Education Research and the DVD Summit in Dublin, Ireland.

Rhonda Y. Williams, Associate Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Williams graduated with a B.S. degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, and earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004), which won the 2004 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. In addition, she has written numerous articles and co-edited and contributed an essay to Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement: Freedom’s Bittersweet Song (2002), an anthology that grew out of her participation in a 1998 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on teaching black freedom struggles at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. Her essay, “Raising the Curtain: Performance, History, and Pedagogy,” discusses the historical place of performance in black politics and focuses on how teachers can use performance as an innovative pedagogical practice. At Case Western, she was awarded a Glennan Fellowship from the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (1999-2000) to develop a service-learning, social change activism course, “City As Classroom,” which was featured as the cover story in the CWRU Magazine in 2001. She has been nominated several times for university-wide teaching awards at Case, and in 2004 she won the Student Government’s Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award for the Arts and Humanities.

Holly Willis, Research Assistant Professor, School of Cinema-Television, and Associate Director for the Multimedia in the Core Program, Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. The Multimedia in the Core program is a campus-wide initiative to introduce multimedia into the general education curriculum at USC. Dr. Willis is responsible for overseeing the introduction of multimedia classes. Her research interests include digital media, experimental writing and media art practices. She is the author of New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, which chronicles the advent of digital filmmaking tools and their impact on contemporary media practices. She is also the former editor of RES Magazine, a bimonthly publication devoted to experiments in film, video and new media. She has written extensively on experimental media practices for a variety of publications and is currently completing research for a book project titled Post-Cinema: New Iterations of Moving Image Art, which examines the recent dismantling of the apparatus of cinema and a dispersal of screens, stories, performers and viewers, all of which are reconsidered and re-mobilized in new cinematic forms. The book will include a multimedia component authored in the open source software application Sophie. Dr. Willis received her B.A. in Philosophy from Boston College and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California.

Ellen Rose Woods, Associate Director of the Introduction to the Humanities Program and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. Dr. Woods earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Pittsburgh and her doctorate in French and Humanities at Stanford University with a specialization in medieval literary studies. Her scholarship includes a 1978 monograph Aye d'Avignon: A Study of Genre and Society (HISTOIRE DES IDEES AND CRITIQUE LITTERAIRE series published by Librairie Droz). She served on the executive staff of the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities, and co-authored the 1980 publication, The Humanities in American Life (University of California Press). In 2002, Dr. Woods contributed to a forum on general education in research universities sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation whose findings were published by The Pennsylvania State University in a monograph, Students in the Balance. She is currently part of a working group on the topic of technology fluency in undergraduate education sponsored by the Teagle Foundation. Dr. Woods taught at Stanford in the Department of French and in the Western Culture. Prior to her current appointment, she was assistant to the Dean of Undergraduate Studies. Other administrative positions she has held at Stanford include serving as “innovation manager" for a series of undergraduate reforms, including Honors College, Sophomore College, Stanford Introductory Seminars, the core freshman curriculum, Undergraduate Research Grant Programs, and several writing initiatives. In 1997, President Gerhard Casper presented her with the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award, Stanford’s highest honor for distinctive contributions to undergraduate education. She has recently held a teaching appointment in the School of Education, offering a graduate course on managing curriculum reform.

June Pierce Youatt, Professor of Family and Child Ecology, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Michigan State University. As Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Dean of Undergraduate Studies, she provides leadership on undergraduate education programs and policy. Her responsibilities include general education, first year programs, living and learning programs, the undergraduate research initiative, and other initiatives that enhance the student academic experience. A member of the Department of Family and Child Ecology for nineteen years, she conducted research, outreach and teaching in the design, development, and evaluation of family-related programs. She served for four years as an Extension specialist. She held an adjunct appointment in the Department of Teacher Education, and worked extensively in teacher preparation and the professional development of teachers and human service workers. Dr. Youatt has had substantial research and service grants from the Michigan Department of Education, and a long history of working with the K-12 education system. She is the recipient of numerous university and professional organization awards for her teaching, outreach, and research.