Project Management Team
Noah Finklstein, Associate Professor, Department of Physics. One of the PI’s and Directors of the Physics education Research Group at Colorado. Finkelstein has published over 40 referred articles in physics education research, is currently PI on three national grants, Co-PI of four others, and serves on four national boards in physics education, including the Physics Education Research Leadership Organizing Council, and the Executive Board of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Education.
Michael Klymkowsky, Professor, Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology, Organizer of DBER, Co-Director of CU Teach (with Otero). Klymkowsky has been active in the LA program and course transformation in Molecular Biology. His biology education research focuses on student understanding of foundational concepts in the biological sciences and together with Kathy Garvin Doxas, has developed a Biology Concept Inventory (BCI) as cell as virtual laboratories used as part of the MCDB course Bio fundamentals.
Valerie Otero, Associate Professor, School of Education. Otero is the Director of the NSF-DRL Colorado Learning Assistant program, the NSF-DUE Noyce Fellowship program, and Co-Director (with Klymkowsky) of the CU-Teach program. Otero serves on three national boards including American Institute of Physics National Task Force for the Professional Preparation of Teachers of Physics. Her research program investigates the recruitment and development of future science teachers and how these students’ identities shift as science majors become science teachers and as non-science majors become elementary science teachers. She has published broadly from Science Magazine to Science and Children Magazine. Otero is author of two nationally recognized curricula in physical science. Otero and her colleagues have brought in an excess of $10 million to fund their efforts in discipline-based education research.
Eric Stade, Professor and Chair, Department of Mathematics. Widely known for his work in number theory, harmonic analysis, and computational physics, Prof. Stade has long standing involvement in education. He is the author of an undergraduate textbook on Fourier Analysis, coordinator and regular teacher of Spirit and Uses of Mathematics, a.k.a. Math for Elementary Education, and former chair of the Integrated Mathematics Committee for the Colorado Commission on Higher Education (CCHE) which formalized a statewide syllabus for college-level Math for Elementary Education courses.
Derek Reamon is the co-Director of the Integrated Teaching and Learning Program in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, and a Senior Instructor in Mechanical Engineering. Reamon completed a doctoral dissertation on engineering education and continues to conduct research in this field. He is currently the PI on an NSF grant investigating the nature of hands-on engineering projects and how the social component of projects impact engineering students.