John McNamara

John started milking cows and feeding pigs in 1968,  and turned a love of animals and food and a fear of hard work into a University Professorship in Animal and Dairy Sciences and Nutrition.  He worked on the homeostasis and homeorhesis of pregnancy and lactation and on maternal diabetes and obesity.   He is not retired from a 35 year career in scientific research and teaching of dairy and swine,  and pet animals.  His text Principles of Companion Animal Nutrition is now in its 3rd Edition, used nationwide.   His work concentrated on the genetics and physiology of efficient food animal production as well as companion animal management.  He began one of the first courses nationwide at the senior level on companion animal management,  taking all the subject matter of nutrition, genetics, physiology and health into practical problem solving.   He also began an introductory course on Pet Nutrition taught as a University General Education Course.  

Since 1992,  he has been a Board member of the Washington Science Teachers Association,  and is presently the President.  He has worked with teachers and educators of all fields and grade levels to help teachers understand high quality integrated teaching,  presently under the guidelines of the Next Generation Science Standards.  He helps professional development on culturally relevant learning,  on climate science teaching, on integrated teaching at all levels.   He works with a number of groups from Federal Science Policy on food and agriculture to informal presentations on food, agriculture and climate change to all audiences

He was asked to help with the Next Generation Science/STEM NSF grant in the disciplinary and pedagogy areas,  helping to connect college faculty and curricular and courses with real-world K-12 STEM/NGSS teaching and learning.    Teachers must be able to be culturally relevant to a variety of students, must be able to, alone or in teams, ensure that students get not only the key subject matter discipline knowledge but the ability to understand and apply same in a variety of practical ways for a number of reasons.   The NGSS are designed to help do this and John looks forward to helping teaching and learning in factually sound and culturally relevant ways.