Linnea Fletcher

Linnea Fletcher was trained in biology, chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California at Irvine and obtained her PhD degree from the University of Texas at Austin in Microbiology. She completed two postdoctoral fellowships the first one at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas in Immunology, and the second in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Texas in Molecular Biology. Based on her interests in education, she became Department Chair of Biology at Austin Community College. She pioneered the use of televised Biology courses to educate students that could not attend in person, and taught every course, even Field Biology, at least once. After several years, she became Dean over half of the curriculum offered at ACC. Supervising 100 faculty she was responsible for Math/Science and Business/IT/workforce courses at a new campus. To meet the increasing need for more biotechnology technicians in the area, Linnea started the Biotechnology Program. At the same time she received an National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Advanced Technological Educational (ATE) grant, BioTechEd, which put biotechnology into area high schools and trained both in-service and pre-service teachers in biotechnology. In 1999, she joined Bio-Link, an ATE Center of Excellence in Biotechnology as a co-principal investigator. Bio-Link has been re-funded from 1999 to the present. During this time, Linnea has been on numerous related ATE projects and state funded grants for the purpose of supporting the Biotechnology industry in Texas.  These grants always include other educational partners. In 2008 she joined NSF as a program director in the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE). There she had the opportunity to work on several programs, TUES, S-STEM, Noyce and ATE. After leaving NSF she went back to ACC and quickly got in involved in a variety of grants based on what she learned at NSF. Believing that community colleges have a role in economic development, Linnea pushed for the development of a wet lab incubator at ACC. Linnea was awarded an Emerging Technology Fund grant to build one. It will open Spring 2017. She also participated on a TAAACCT grant through Bio-Link, continued to participate on Bio-Link, and was awarded an ATE Center of Excellence known as AC2 Bio-Link Regional Center last fall.