Michigan State University Postdoctoral Research Associate: Biology Education Plant Biology Department
Applications are sought for a postdoctoral fellow to work on an NSF-funded grant as part of a team of ecologists and computer scientists developing an assessment database for undergraduate science education. This is the first national assessment database in higher education. You will have the opportunity to develop substantive credentials in teaching and learning that are fully integrated with your scientific expertise. The position offers opportunities for scholarly work about faculty change and student learning in large enrollment, introductory biology courses. This project is a component of FIRST (Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching), a long-term project providing faculty opportunities to learn and practice scientific teaching (Handelsman et 2004). The position is available June 1, 2007 for one year, with annual extensions possible. Candidates should have a PhD in the life sciences, a deep interest in undergraduate teaching and learning, and experience with data manipulation and analysis. The candidate must have strong communication and organizational skills. Particularly strong candidates will have experience organizing and merging data from various sources, annotating data sets with metadata, and the design of relational databases. The postdoctoral fellow will work with the PIs (Diane Ebert-May and Mark Urban-Lurain) and biology faculty nation-wide to develop the database and accompanying educational metadata standards, while critically assessing effective instruction in undergraduate science courses. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to collaboratively teach undergraduates in large, introductory courses and to collect and analyze data using the assessment database to pursue scholarly questions about the learning of science. Interested candidates are invited to apply by April 15, 2007. Please send (electronically) a letter of application, CV, and names of references to Dr. Diane Ebert-May: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For further information contact: Diane Ebert-May, Professor Department of Plant Biology 270 Plant Biology Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 (v) 517-432-7171 Handelsman J, Ebert-May D, Beichner R, Bruins P, Chang A, DeHaan R, Gentile J, Lauffer S, Steward J, Tilghman S, Wood W. 2004. Scientific teaching. Science 304:521-522. -- Diane Ebert-May, PhD Professor, Plant Biology 166 Plant Biology Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 (office) 517.432.7171 (cell) 517.256.3536 (fax) 517.353.1926 http://www.first2.org http://www.msu.edu/course/plb/203/home.html http://www.msu.edu/course/isb/202/ebertmay/home.html http://www.plantbiology.msu.edu
