Professor Alison Wallace is a finalist for Faculty Development Coordinator, will hold open forum
The Faculty Development Committee announces that Professor Alison Wallace, finalist for the position of Faculty Development Coordinator, will be presenting an Open Forum on Thursday, Oct. 18, from 1-2 p.m. in the Comstock Memorial Union, Room 203. She will speak for 15 minutes on the topic of “How the role of university faculty will change in the next decade and how Faculty Development will play a role in that change,” followed by time for audience questions. Below is a brief bio prepared by Wallace. Feedback forms will be available at the forum.
Alison Wallace
Professor of Biosciences, Minnesota State University Moorhead
Alison Wallace obtained a B.A. in Biology from St. Olaf College in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution in 1997 from Stony Brook University. While a graduate student, she received a NASA Global Change Fellowship for her research on the effects of elevated carbon dioxide on nitrogen-fixing plants, and also became involved in an undergraduate biology education reform project. This experience sparked her interest in becoming a science educator and she taught high school biology in Marin County, California and Faribault, Minnesota. She spent two years as an Education Specialist for a U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grant in Grand Forks, ND, where she developed online curricula for K-12 students and teachers and helped design and deliver in-service educational technology workshops. In 2000, she joined the Biosciences Department at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where she currently teaches content and methods courses for education majors, courses for sustainability majors, courses for biology majors within the Biosciences Living Learning Community, and advises secondary life science education majors. Her research interests range from small-scale undergraduate projects on the ecology of local prairie plants to large scale education projects, such as her involvement with the Minnesota Teacher Research Network that investigated the practices of beginning math and science teachers across the state. In 2008, she was awarded a National Science Foundation grant, along with Dr. Meena Balgopal of Colorado State University, to evaluate the effectiveness of guided writing on ecological literacy in undergraduates. This fall, she and Tim Harms (Mathematics) received a capacity building grant from the National Science Foundation to put together partnerships to develop recruiting, mentoring, and evaluation plans in preparation for a future grant application to award scholarships and internships to pre-service science and math teachers.