The Faculty Role in Creating Inclusive STEM Environments

Dr. Susan Keenan has 20 years of experience as a faculty member and administrator in higher education. She is a professor of biological sciences and the Director of the STEM Inclusive Excellence Collective at the University of Northern Colorado. As a first-generation and working-class woman in science, Dr. Keenan is committed to creating inclusive environments within and beyond the classroom. With funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Inclusive Excellence program, Dr. Keenan, her colleague Dr. Jodie Novak, and collaborators developed the Inclusive Excellence Teacher Scholar (IETS) Workshops with the goal of increasing faculty awareness, providing practice-based strategies, and supporting faculty as they make changes in their classrooms to create equitable spaces.

Marisa Chrysochoou is a Professor and Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut. She obtained her BS in Physics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, her MS in Environmental Engineering at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany and her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. She was hired as an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut in 2007, promoted to Associate Professor in 2013, Full Professor in 2019 and was recently appointed as the first female Department Head in the School of Engineering. Dr. Chrysochoou serves as the Principal Investigator of the project “Beyond Accommodation: Leveraging Neurodiversity for Engineering Innovation.” Sponsored by the National Science Foundation Revolutionizing Engineering Departments program, this 5-year project aims at transforming educational practices and cultivating the potential of neurodivergent individuals to contribute to engineering breakthroughs.