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Alysa Remsburg is now Assistant Professor of Biology at Unity College, Maine. She emphasizes that earning a PhD alone does not qualify a scientist to be a good teacher.  “College students learn so much more from faculty who are focused on student learning,” she says. “Training PhD candidates to be good teachers seems to me an outstanding investment in overall student learning.  My involvement with  Delta was critical in helping me develop as a teacher.”

Matt D'Amato now teaches Physics and Climate Science at New York’s Vanguard High School and is completing a graduate degree at Columbia University. He says the Delta experience gave him the tools and skills to become a better instructor.  In particular, Delta’s "teaching-as-research" emphasis is embedded in his practice as he reflects, revises, and improves his instruction, no matter the course or grade-level, high school or college. Delta taught him how to take "cutting-edge" science research and translate that content into meaningful experiences for his students' learning.  He says, “The Delta internship shaped my understanding of how to collaborate with researchers and educators to develop, implement, and improve a new educational tool.”

Sam Pazicni is Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of New Hampshire. The Delta program gave him the tools to begin asking teaching's most difficult questions: "Are my students learning?" and "How can I improve my students' learning?"  These questions intrigued him so much that he devotes a good deal of time tackling them in his career in chemistry research.  “Because Delta exposed me to issues in teaching and learning early in my graduate career,” he says, “I now enjoy translating psychology and education research as I design instructional materials for real chemistry classrooms.”

Jenny Gubbels now teaches at Augustana College in Illinois.  She says Delta taught her the importance of thinking critically about teaching methods and of “going many steps beyond just delivering information.”  She sees her role as encouraging students to think critically and to consider current issues and moral problems that are related to the topic at hand.  She participates in a group that does outreach activities for underserved schools in the Sioux Falls area.  She plans to develop classroom labs that are based on experiments she does in her research lab.  These labs will teach basic concepts while at the same time exposing students to the types of assays that are done in that particular research field. 

Amy Kamarainen is now a Post-doctoral Fellow at the EcoMUVE Project, Harvard University. She says her Delta experience gave her the latitude to channel her energies into non-traditional modes of service to the science community. She translates her knowledge of contemporary ecosystems science into classroom curricula and wants to reach middle school students to help them see how science is relevant in their daily lives. Increasing diversity in science fields will only be achieved if young people have a sense of self-efficacy and interest that will carry them through challenging aspects of science training.  The Delta community provided role models for how to conduct research and outreach at important interdisciplinary boundaries, she says.

Katie Cadwell is now a chemistry instructor and general chemistry course coordinator at Madison Area Technical College (MATC). She completed a Delta Teaching-as-Research internship and recalls how the “College Classroom” course emphasized how to determine whether students were comprehending her presentations.  Katie was first hired as a postdoctoral researcher in the Interdisciplinary Education Group (IEG) of the UW-Madison Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, where she helped design, deliver and evaluate science education and outreach tools to post-secondary, K-12 and general public audiences.  At MATC she applies these techniques to create, deploy and evaluate instructional materials in her chemistry, math, and pre-engineering classes.