Jean Alley
CIRTL -Vanderbilt Program Coordinator
Dept. of Biomedical Engineering Vanderbilt Univesity

Jean Alley is the Coordinator for CIRTL activities on the Vanderbilt campus. She previously worked with the VaNTH Engineering Research Center for Bioengineering Education. During her tenure with VaNTH she worked with many experts on educational research and practice. She also worked with many undergraduates students who participated in the VaNTH REU program. During those years she developed skills and interest in working with diversity issues in higher education. Presently she serves as a member of the CIRTL Learning-Through-Diversity-in-Action team.

Richard Cyr
Professor of Biology
Penn State University
http://www.bio.psu.edu/home/directory/homepages/rjc8

Richard Cyr is a Professor of Biology and the Associate Head for Undergraduate Affairs in the Biology Department at Penn State.  He has received several teaching awards at Penn State while maintaining an active research program in plant cell biology.  He has taught classes that range from freshman seminars to graduate courses in plant biology.  He has participated in many nationally sponsored workshops on undergraduate education and has organized various workshops for graduate students, post-docs, and faculty on various instructional topics.  This is the fourth year that he has been involved in the STEMES workshop.

Derek Bruff
Asst. Dir., Center for Teaching
Senior Lecturer, Mathematics Dept
http://derekbruff.com/site/

Derek Bruff is an Assistant Director for the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University.  He is also actively involved in teaching in the Mathematics Department. His interest in using technology well in the classroom led to his research and ultimately the publication of a book on "clickers". His book was published this year, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass, 2009).

Alene Harris
Research Assistant Professor of Education
Vanderbilt University
http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/x4806.xml

Alene H. Harris, Ph.D., is a Research Assistant Professor of Education at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. She taught in Nashville, TN, for 16 years in suburban, inner-city, and private school classrooms before pursuing a Ph.D. in Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.

Her research interests involve effective teaching and learning, especially in secondary science classrooms and at the post-secondary level in bioengineering education. Current activities include research and development of classroom observation instruments that quantify the classroom experience. As an investigator with the VaNTH Engineering Research Center in Bioengineering Educational Technologies, she has developed and conducted workshops on this topic for various departments of Biomedical Engineering across the country.

For the past five years her focus has included the postsecondary level. As the Director of the Educational Program for the VaNTH (Vanderbilt-Northwestern-University of Texas-Harvard/MIT Health Sciences) Engineering Research Center in Bioengineering Educational Technologies, she has developed and conducted workshops in applying principles of effective teaching and learning in college-level classes. In this role she has conducted workshops for University faculties and graduate students across the country, including Vanderbilt, Northwestern, the University of Florida, the University of Washington, Duke, Harvard, and MIT.

Karl Smith
Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor
Professor of Civil Engineering
University of Minnesota
http://www.ce.umn.edu/~smith/

Karl has been at the University of Minnesota since 1972 and is in phased retirement as Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Profess and Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research and development interests include building rigorous research capacity in engineering education; the role of cooperation in learning and design; problem formulation, modeling, and knowledge engineering; and project and knowledge management. His Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees are in Metallurgical Engineering from Michigan Technological University, 1969 & 1972, and his Ph.D. is in Education Psychology from the University of Minnesota, 1980.

His research and development interests include building rigorous research capacity in engineering education, the role of cooperation in learning and design; problem formulation, modeling, and knowledge engineering; and project and knowledge management and leadership.

He has written eight books including How to model it: Problem solving for the computer age (with A.M. Starfield and A.L. Bleloch), published by McGraw-Hill in 1990 (and republished by Interaction Book Company in 1994); Cooperative learning: Increasing college faculty instructional productivity (with David and Roger Johnson),  published by ASHE-ERIC Reports on Higher Education in 1991; Strategies for energizing large classes: From small groups to learning communities (with James Cooper and Jean MacGregor) published in Jossey-Bass’s New Direction for Teaching and Learning series in 2000; and Teamwork and project management, 3rd Ed. (with P.K. Imbrie) published in McGraw-Hill’s BEST Series in 2007