Invited Participants
Stephanie Pfirman (workshop co-chair) is Hirschorn Professor in Environmental and Applied Sciences, chair of the Department of Environmental Science at Barnard College, and Barnard’s Director of Interdisciplinary Initiatives. Her research includes environmental aspects of sea ice in the Arctic, and the development of women scientists and interdisciplinary scholars. Dr. Pfirman is co-PI of the NSF-sponsored Advancing Women in the Sciences initiative at the Columbia Earth Institute, and is president-elect of the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors.
Diana Rhoten (workshop co-chair) is Program Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, NSF and Program Director, Knowledge Institutions at the Social Science Research Council. Using quantitative and qualitative techniques of social network and fieldwork analysis, Dr. Rhoten's research focuses on the social and technical conditions of interdisciplinary research and the practices and processes of integrative graduate education and training. In addition to publishing in this area, Dr. Rhoten works with various organizations on the design and development of new modes and methods of knowledge production and innovation. She is particularly interested in how the emergence of collaborative research strategies, the growing significance of virtual communities, and the shifting influence of non-academic versus academic opportunities are changing institutions of education, training, and research.
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Bianca L. Bernstein is Professor of Psychology in Education and Higher Education and Policy Studies at Arizona State University. Dr. Bernstein is a national leader in graduate education, having served as the Dean of ASU’s Graduate College and Director of NSF’s Division of Graduate Education among other roles. Her over 200 publications and presentations have focused on graduate education reform and the advancement of women and underrepresented minorities. Dr. Bernstein is the Principal Investigator for a large NSF-supported project to increase the personal resilience skills of women in STEM doctoral programs, in the hope that increased resilience will be positively related to degree completion and persistence in STEM.
Veronica Boix Mansilla, Harvard University, is a co-principal investigator with Howard Gardner in the "Interdisciplinary Studies Project" funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. This study examines the intellectual, organizational, and pedagogical qualities of exemplary interdisciplinary work as it takes place in expert institutions and exemplary collegiate and pre-collegiate educational programs. Drawing on data collected at institutions such as the MIT Media Lab, the Stanford Human Biology program, and the Illinois Math and Science Academy, the study is developing a framework to characterize interdisciplinary work and inform interdisciplinary educational practice
Craig Calhoun has been President of the Social Science Research Council since 1999. He is also University Professor of the Social Sciences at NYU. Under Calhoun's leadership, the SSRC has been reinvigorated as a leader of public social science, research on critical social issues, and support for leading young researchers. He has launched new work on knowledge institutions and innovation, on information technology, on HIV/AIDS and social transformation, and on media, democracy and the public sphere.
Elizabeth A. Corley is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University. Dr. Corley's research is in the areas of evaluation and science policy. Her research projects focus on the development of innovative methodologies for program evaluation, the evaluation of science and engineering research centers, and the social impacts of science. Dr. Corley is currently the Principal Investigator for the external evaluation of the NSF-funded Learning in Formal and Informal Environments (LIFE) Center and serves as a Co-Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU).
Alice Dean is Professor of Mathematics at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY, where she has been a member of the Mathematics & Computer Science Department since 1986. She does research in graph theory and computational geometry. From 1993 to 1995, Prof. Dean served as Assistant to the Dean of Faculty for Diversity, advising department chairs on how to increase diversity in hiring and organizing college events to raise community awareness of diversity issues.
Anthony DePass is the Associate Dean of Research, Director of the Minorities Biomedical Research Support program, and an Associate Professor of Biology at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University. As Chairman of the Minorities Affairs Committee of the American Society of Cell Biologists, he leads the implementation of several programs at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels. More recently, Dr. DePass Co-Chaired a panel selected by the National Academies of Sciences that planned a workshop titled "Understanding Interventions that Encourage Minorities to Pursue Research Careers: Major Questions and Appropriate Methods."
Geraldine Downey is Columbia University’s Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives, as well as Professor and Director of the Social Relations Laboratory in the Department of Psychology. Dr. Downey is a leading developmental psychologist recognized for her path-breaking research on identity formation and for her vigorous commitment to mentoring students. She has conducted extensive research on rejection sensitivity in the context of interpersonal relationships. In her role as Vice Provost, Dr. Downey is giving special attention to the question of diversity in the sciences.
Gail Dubrow is Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost at the University of Minnesota. She is responsible for fostering best practices in graduate education and advancing innovation through interdisciplinary initiatives. Prior to her appointment, Dr. Dubrow was Professor of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Planning, with adjunct appointments in History and Women's Studies at the University of Washington. Dr. Dubrow is currently leading a consortium of ten public and private research universities in self-studies addressing the changes in policy and practice needed to foster interdiscipinary inquiry. The results of this study wil be released at a fall 2008 conference.
Susan Elrod is associate Professor of Biological Sciences at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. In 2006-2007, Dr. Elrod was an American Council on Education Fellow at The Colorado College, where she conducted research on interdisciplinary and integrated models of higher education. She also studied institutional and leadership issues surrounding undergraduate interdisciplinary programs and STEM education.
Mary Frank Fox is an ADVANCE Professor in the School of Public Policy, and co-director of the Center for the Study of Women, Science, & Technology, at Georgia Tech. Her research has established ways in which the participation and performance of women and men are affected by social and organizational features of science and academia. She has addressed these complex processes in a range of research encompassing education and educational programs, collaborative practices, salary rewards, publication productivity, social attributions and expectations, and academic careers.
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The author of over twenty books translated into twenty-three languages, and several hundred articles, Dr. Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. Currently he is studying the nature of interdisciplinary work as it is carried out in pre-collegiate and collegiate settings as well as in research institutions.
Gerald Holton is the Mallinckrodt Research Professor of Physics and Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is interested in the history and philosophy of science, in the physics of matter at high pressure, and in the study of career paths of young scientists. With Gerhard Sonnert, Dr. Holton is co-author of Gender Differences in Science Careers: The Project Access Study (1995) and Who Succeeds in Science? The Gender Dimension (1995).
Roberto Ibarra is associate Professor of Sociology and the Special Assistant for Diversity Initiatives in the Office of the President at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Ibarra directs the University's diversity initiatives, including recruitment and retention efforts for women and minorities in faculty and staff positions. He is a nationally recognized expert on diversity/minority issues in higher education, and the author of Beyond Affirmative Action: Reframing the Context of Higher Education (2001).
Julie Thompson Klein is Professor of Humanities in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University. She is past president of the Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) and former editor of the AIS journal Issues in Integrative Studies. Her books include Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (l990), Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996), Interdisciplinary Education in K-12 and College (edited, 2002), Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (2005), and the monograph Mapping Interdisciplinary Studies (1999). She recently completed a new book on “Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures.”
Erin Leahey is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. To study gender differences in science, Dr. Leahey has developed measures for two important but typically unmeasured constructs – the extent of research specialization and subfield integration – and she recently won an award for these developments from Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (see http://info.csa.com/sociological discovery/). Dr. Leahey has designed studies to test whether and how specialization affects academic career outcomes, such as productivity (Gender & Society 2006) and earnings (American Sociological Review 2007). She has also found that research papers that integrate two subfields are viewed as more innovative, and hopes to expand this project to measure and study the reception of research that integrates two or more disciplines.
Susan Levine is co-director of the Center for Early Childhood Research at the University of Chicago and serves as the chair of the Psychology Department’s Developmental Psychology Program and is a co-director of the Spatial Intelligence Learning Center, an NSF-funded Science of Learning Center. Dr. Levine’s research interests include early quantitative and spatial development, individual differences in these domains, including gender differences and SES differences, and investigations of the kinds of early inputs that support development in these domains.
Juan Lucena is Associate Professor at the Liberal Arts and International Studies Division at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM). Juan obtained a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Virginia Tech and a MS in STS and BS in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). As a cultural history of U.S. policymaking for education and human resources in S&E, his book Defending the Nation: U.S. Policymaking to Create Scientists and Engineers from Sputnik to the ‘War Against Terrorism’ (University Press of America, 2005) provides a comprehensive history of the education and development of scientists and engineers in the U.S. in the last five decades. For the last decade, he has researched how images of globalization shape engineering education, hiring practices, and engineering practices and designs under an NSF CAREER Award.
Donna Nelson is Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. In addition to her widely recognized work in physical organic chemistry, Dr. Nelson is the PI of a large study which surveyed faculty race/ethnicity, gender, and rank of “top 50” departments in each of the 14 science and engineering disciplines to reveal that the representation of females and underrepresented minorities on faculties is much less than in degree attainment.
Wendy C. Newstetter is the Director of Learning Sciences Research in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Dr. Newstetter’s research focuses on understanding cognition and learning in interdisciplines with an eye towards designing educational environments that support the development of integrative problem solving. Her ethnographic investigations of three interdisciplinary research laboratories have informed the design of problem-driven learning classrooms at Georgia Tech designed to both empower students as self-directed learners and to foster the development of integrative model-based reasoning. With support from the Spencer Foundation, she has investigated the experiences of under-represented minorities in university research settings to better understand how gender and race are enacted at the bench top.
Alan L. Porter's major concentration is technology forecasting and assessment. He served on the University of Washington faculty through 1974. In 1975 he joined the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he now serves as Professor Emeritus. He also is Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and co-directs the Technology Policy and Assessment Center at Georgia Tech. He also serves as director of R&D For Search Technology, Inc., who produce “VantagePoint” software. His current interests focus on computer-aided exploration of information in electronic Science &Technology databases. Dr. Porter's recent projects include High Tech Indicators of national competitiveness (NSF); Profiling of research proposals (NSF); and profiling a country’s Research (ONR). He is an ongoing evaluator of the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative – a 15-year, $40 million program to bolster interdisciplinary research and education in the U.S.
Maria S. Rivera Maulucci is an Assistant Professor of Education at Barnard College. She teaches courses in secondary pedagogical methods and science education, including “Science in the City,” a seminar that brings together in-service teachers from New York City public schools, pre-service teachers from the Barnard Education Program, and science majors to develop their science content and pedagogical knowledge and foster student achievement in science. Her research interests include multicultural and critical science pedagogy and social justice teacher education. Currently, Maria draws upon sociological theories of emotions and cultural historical activity theory to understand in-service and pre-service teacher learning and development.
Laurel Smith-Doerr is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University and Program Director in the Science, Technology & Society Program at the National Science Foundation. Her interests lie in organizational and economic sociology, social studies of science and technology, and gender and work issues. Dr. Smith-Doerr’s most recent book – Women's Work: Gender Equality vs. Hierarchy in the Life Sciences (2004) – examines how network organizations are more conducive to gender equality than are more hierarchical settings. Generally, Smith-Doerr is interested in tensions in the institutionalization of science: including networks in the biotechnology industry, commercialization in the university, contributions of immigrants to the knowledge economy, gendering in hierarchies, and scientists’ responses to ethics education.
Jen Schneider is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and International Studies at the Colorado School of Mines, where she teaches film, writing, and environmental and professional ethics, and is the coordinator of first-year writing. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University in 2003. Her dissertation examined the way marginalized identities (the gay, the disabled, the aging, the multiracial) were made central in American film and literature of the early Cold War period. One arm of her current research addresses representations of science, engineering, and the environment in American film; the other examines the role of the engineer in sustainable community development projects.
Gerhard Sonnert is an Associate of the Harvard Physics Department and a Research Manager at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His research has focused on women’s careers in the sciences. With Gerald Holton, Dr. Sonnert is co-author of Gender Differences in Science Careers: The Project Access Study (1995) and Who Succeeds in Science? The Gender Dimension (1995).
Orlando Taylor is Dean of Howard University's Graduate School, Vice Provost for Research and a Professor in the School of Communications. As Vice Provost for Research, he is responsible for increasing the number of Ph.D. recipients in science, math, and engineering. Dr. Taylor is the author of numerous books, chapters and articles in the field of communication disorders and linguistics. He is also the recipient of numerous awards and honors.
Sharon Traweek is an Associate Professor of History at UCLA, whose current research focuses on crafting cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine. Dr. Traweek is author of Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (1988).She has also published 25 articles in books and journals of anthropology, Asian studies, communications, cultural studies, history, and women's studies.
Wanda E. Ward is the Deputy Assistant Director of the U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Education and Human Resources. Prior to joining the NSF, Dr. Ward served as tenured Associate Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of the Center for Research on Multi-Ethnic Education at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. She has also held academic positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools. She took the B.A. in Psychology and the Afro-American Studies Certificate from Princeton University and the Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. Recent awards include: the 2006Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Executive and the 2006 Richard T. Louttit Award.
Elke Weber is a Professor of Psychology and the Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business at Columbia University. Her research is on behavioral models of decision-making under risk and uncertainty, with a focus on the cognitive and affective underpinnings of preference construction and on psychologically appropriate ways to measure and model individual and cultural differences in risk taking, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental decision-making and policy. At Columbia, she founded and co-directs the Center for the Decision Sciences (CDS), which fosters and facilitates cross-disciplinary research and graduate training in the basic and applied decision sciences, and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), which coordinates interdisciplinary research on individual and group responses to climate variability and climate change.