Staff Profiles
Jean MacGregor is a Senior Scholar at the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education at The Evergreen State College, where she also teaches in the Masters of Environmental Studies Program. She directs the "Curriculum for the Bioregion" Initiative, a faculty and curriculum development project involving 32 colleges and universities in the Puget Sound bioregion. Its goal is to enable more undergraduates to live and act in a world where questions of environmental quality, environmental justice, and sustainability are paramount. With Barbara Leigh Smith, Jean co-founded the Washington Center in 1985, where she supported campuses in and beyond Washington State in launching curricular learning community initiatives. She also worked with other Washington Center projects on cultural pluralism, academic success for students of color, and mathematics and science reform. For her learning communities leadership,in 1998 Change magazine named MacGregor one of eleven "Agenda-Setters" among its eighty "past, present and future leaders of higher education.
Cathy Middlecamp is a Distinguished Faculty Associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, holding a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry and the Integrated Liberal Studies Program. She directs the Chemistry Learning Center, a program with a 30-year track record of offering academic support to students in general and organic chemistry from underrepresented groups. She is the Editor-in-Chief for the 7th edition of Chemistry in Context, a project of the American Chemical Society that teaches chemistry through urgent, real-world societal issues. She also served as the lead author for the chapters on air quality, acid rain, and nuclear energy. She has served as a Senior Associate for SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities) since its inception in 2000 and co-developed a SENCER Model Course "Uranium and American Indians." Middlecamp did her undergraduate studies at Cornell University (1968-72), graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a Danforth Fellowship for graduate study.
Susan Millar is a Senior Scientist at the UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research. A cultural anthropologist by training, she has for some 20 years conducted evaluation and research on efforts to improve education in the STEM disciplines at both higher education and K-12 levels. Her research focuses on organizational change, including the development of partnerships, and faculty, teacher, and student learning associated with reform in STEM education. Millar has served on the national advisory boards of numerous organizations focused on these issues, including the NSF’s Advisory Board for the Education and Human Resources Directorate, which she chaired. She created and directed the UW-Madison Learning through Evaluation, Adaptation, and Dissemination (LEAD) Center, which completed some 75 evaluation research projects focused on STEM education. She co-authored A Silent Success: Master’s Education in the United States, and led the Institute on Learning Technology, a project of the National Institute for Science Education’ College Level One team.
Elaine Seymour is Director Emerita and Research Associate of Ethnography & Evaluation Research (E&ER), Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She established and directed E&ER, and, with colleagues there conducted seminal research into the causes of STEM undergraduate attrition, barriers to the greater participation and success in STEM education and careers of women and students of color, the processes of change in STEM education (including sources of resistance), the role of teaching assistants in the improvement of STEM undergraduate education, and the contribution of undergraduate research to the educational and professional development of STEM undergraduates. As a program evaluator, she has monitored and recorded the successes, problems, and processes of change involved in both institutional and multi-institutional STEM reform initiatives. In addition to participation in Reshaping STEM Education, she is collaborating on a book based on E&ER's studies of undergraduate research, and on development and extension of her Student Assessment of their Learning Gains (SALG) instrument and redesign of its website.
Catherine L. Fry is a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation. She received her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2006. During her graduate studies, she was active both in the classroom and in several university programs aimed at enriching undergraduate biology education for majors and non-majors. For her work with a large-enrollment cell biology course, she received the Jane Prichard Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her experiences with these students deepened her commitment to strengthening science education, prompting her to become more broadly involved in education efforts after completing her doctoral studies. Prior to coming to the NSF, she worked with several outreach programs designed to prepare students and working professionals for graduate studies. Originally from Illinois, Catherine also holds a B.A. in biology with a concentration in environmental science from Knox College in Galesburg, IL.
Our Program Officer at the NSF
Myles Boylan is a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where he has served as a member of the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) since 1984. In DUE, he co-leads the National Dissemination component of the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement program and leads the Distinguished Teaching Scholars program. In addition, he is a member of the Division of Graduate Education, in which he served for two years as the Acting Division Director and currently leads the Graduate Education Research program. In addition, Dr. Boylan has participated significantly in the operation and management of 6 other NSF grants programs. Before joining NSF, he held academic appointments in economics at the Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and Colby College. While at Colby College he served as department chair. His academic research focused on the process and diffusion of technological innovation in private industry, particularly manufacturing. His instructional innovations included early advocacy and practice of small group learning.
