EarthConnections Alliance Team

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Alliance Management Team

Lead PI - Cathy Manduca, Director, SERC, Carleton College
Cathy Manduca's Page
She is the Executive Director of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT); has led community development of the premier portals for geoscience education and use of engaged pedagogies in STEM education; and has successfully led large community activities to improve geoscience teaching, strengthen geoscience departments, and most recently to teach about the Earth in the context of relevant societal issues.

Kevine Bonine, Director, Education and Outreach, University of Arizona Biosphere 2
Biosphere 2
He is Director of Education & Outreach at Biosphere 2 and affiliated faculty at the University of Arizona in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. His background includes herpetology, ecology, evolutionary physiology, and conservation biology. He strives to share the importance of science, including the process and key findings, with the public and K-12 students and educators.

Donna Charlevoix, Director, Education and Community Engagement, UNAVCO
UNAVCO Education
She manages the portfolio of education, outreach, and geo-workforce development at NSF's Geodetic Facility. Her team includes specialists and activities centered on geo-workforce, and broadening participation through intentional mentoring and professional development (Charlevoix and Morris, 2014, 2015; Fifolt and Searby, 2010; Morris and Charlevoix, 2014), science education (Douglas et al., 2014; Pratt-Sitaula et al., 2015), and communications (Bartel and Charlevoix, 2015). UNAVCO supports over 210 U.S. university and international consortium members (Phillips et al., 2015; Wdowinski and Eriksson, 2009).

Barbara Nagle, Director, Science Education for Public Understanding Program (SEPUP), Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley
SEPUP
SEPUP materials integrate disciplinary concepts with science and engineering practices in the context of personal and social issues related to science and have been shown to produce measurable gains in science learning and persistence in STEM fields (Scott, 2000).

Raj Pandya, Program Director, Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX), American Geophysical Union
AGU's Thriving Earth Exchange
TEX helps communities, including historically under-served communities, leverage relevant science and work with scientists to advance their priorities and address their challenges related to climate change, natural hazards, and resources. TEX has launched 34 projects connecting science and scientists to local communities and mentored over 50 scientists and community leaders.

John Taber, Director, Education and Public Outreach, Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS)
IRIS Education and Public Outreach
IRIS' commitment to workforce development includes a distributed REU program (Hubenthal and Taber, 2014); introducing underrepresented minorities to geophysics via a field experiences program; developing data-rich activities for the undergraduate classroom (Taber et al., 2014); and supporting early career investigators via mentoring, webinars, and workshops (Colella et al., 2015; Hubenthal et al., 2015). As the NSF seismology facility, IRIS supports research and education in a seismology consortium of over 120 university members and 20 educational affiliates (Taber et al., 2015).

Margie Turrin, Director of Educational Field Programs, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
Education at Lamont-Doherty
She leads Lamont's field education program focusing on building authentic science field experiences into science education with a strong focus on engaging the local community in this work. She has coordinated programs that link local land use planning with geoscience education (Planning Land Use with Students), summer field research experiences for high school students under-represented in the sciences and faculty development programs around incorporating sense of place into the curriculum.

Research and Evaluation Team

Debra Bragg, Director, Community College Research Initiatives, University of Washington; Bragg & Associates, Inc.
Community College Research Initiatives at the University of Washington
She is president of Bragg & Associates, Inc., an S Corp that focuses on educational evaluation and performance improvement, with a strong commitment to equitable outcomes for all learners. She spent over 25 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was founding director of the Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL). Dr. Bragg is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association and 2016 recipient of the Distinguished Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Ellen Iverson, Director of Evaluation, SERC
Ellen Iverson's Page
She has successfully led the collection of shared metrics from more than 123 participating schools. Her work includes the evaluation, educational research, and usability efforts that ground SERC projects in the reality of educator practice. She approaches evaluation and assessment from a constructivist perspective and has expertise in both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Noah Feinstein, Associate Professor, Departments of Community and Environmental Sociology & Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison
He is an expert in science curriculum, science literacy, public and informal science education, and instruction with a specialty in agronomy education.

Karen Peterman, Ph.D., President, Karen Peterman Consulting, Inc.
Karen Peterman Consulting
She has a decade-plus experience conducting developmental evaluation of NSF-funded STEM projects. She has conducted research and evaluation on communities of practice to document the success of a community of practice using common measures and metrics across 24 partner sites.

Alexandra Schindel, Assistant Professor of Science Education, University at Buffalo—SUNY
Alexandra Schindel's Page
Alexa leads a research program in science education focusing on youth engagement in science within communities that have historically been underrepresented in science fields. She partners with educators to examine youths' science identities and how they leverage science for personal and community impact when engaged in science learning that is important to their communities.