Michelle Withers, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Biology and the STEM Educator for the Center for Learning and Teaching at the Binghamton University, SUNY. Michelle is a discipline-based education researcher whose work has two main foci: a) studying the impact of high impact teaching practices and whole-person development approaches on student outcomes; and b) developing and evaluating the impact of professional learning programs on fostering broad adoption of evidence-based practices by college faculty, especially in STEM disciplines.
She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Scientific/Scholarly Teaching; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Higher Education and How to Live a Meaningful Life. Withers received her BS in Public Health/Nutrition from the University of North Carolina in 1989 and her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Arizona in 1995. As a post-doctoral fellow at Brandeis University, Withers performed research on the biological basis of behavior in a relatively simple neural network in crustaceans. As an instructor at Louisiana State University, she became involved with the National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Biology Education (NASI). She then joined the faculty at West Virginia University as a discipline-based education researcher in the biology department. There she developed the first regional offshoot of the NASI and is now leading the Mobile Summer Institutes, a place-based iteration, that travels to institutions to train faculty and address barriers to improving STEM education.
She is the Director of the Mobile Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching (MoSIs), leads the NSF-funded network of national STEM education reform initiatives, NSITE, is a AAAS Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) Fellow, is a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER), serves on the Executive Committee for the National Institutes on Scientific Teaching (NIST) and serves on the external advisory board for CourseSource. Dr. Withers is a co-author on the AAAS report Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology: A Call to Action (2011) and on Assessment In the College Science Classroom (2014), a book in the Scientific Teaching series.