For general questions about the ICSAM program, please email us at our team email address shown below…
ICSAM team email address: msu.icsam@gmail.com
For more information about our team members, please see the biographies below…
Danny Caballero is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering. He holds the Lappan-Phillips Chair of Physics Education, co-directs the Physics Education Research Lab, and is the principal investigator of the Learning Machines Lab. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Texas at Austin, and his Master’s and PhD in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Danny worked as a Science Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder before joining the faculty at Michigan State. His research focuses on computational education and the use of data science to address questions in STEM education. In his free time, he bikes, skateboards, and barbecues. His website can be found here.
Contact email: caballero@pa.msu.edu
David Stroupe is an associate professor of teacher education and science education, the associate director of STEM Teacher Education at the CREATE for STEM Institute, and the Director of Science and Society at State at Michigan State University. He has three overlapping areas of research interests anchored around ambitious and equitable teaching. First, he frames classrooms as science practice communities. Using lenses from Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), he examines how teachers and students disrupt epistemic injustice through the negotiation of power, knowledge, and epistemic agency. Second, he examines how beginning teachers learn from practice in and across their varied contexts. Third, he studies how teacher preparation programs can provide support and opportunities for beginning teachers to learn from practice. David has a background in biology and taught secondary life science for four years. He enjoys Ultimate Frisbee, tennis, and hiking in his free time.
Contact email: dstroupe@msu.edu
Dr. Niral Shah is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Washington, where he also directs the Race, Theory, and Design Lab. His research concerns how people learn racism and anti-racism. Shah’s prior work has focused on race and racism in STEM education, specifically how racial narratives about STEM ability affect students’ identities and participation in classrooms. He is also a co-developer of the EQUIP classroom observation tool (https://www.equip.ninja/), which supports teachers and educational leaders to identify and mitigate implicit bias in classrooms.
Contact Email: niral@uw.edu
Dan Weller is a post-doctoral research associate working in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MSU in 2018 and his Bachelor of Science in Chemical Physics from Saginaw Valley State University in 2014. Currently, he conducts research on computational thinking practices that students engage in while working through computational assignments. He also facilitates PD events, visits high school classrooms, and recruits new teachers to participate in ICSAM events. In his free time, he enjoys going for runs, snowboarding, and playing saxophone.
Contact Email: wellerd2@msu.edu
Paul Hamerski is a PhD candidate in the Physics Education Research Lab at MSU. He is interested broadly in researching computation as a tool for learning science at the high school and undergraduate levels. His research is about students’ perspectives on the challenges that computational tools bring to the physics classroom and the social positioning that happens when students do computation. He helped plan and facilitate the ICSAM workshops and workdays, and he helped develop and teach an introductory physics course at MSU, Project & Practices in Physics: Electricity & Magnetism.
Contact Email: tallpaul@msu.edu
Sunghwan Byun is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University. His research focuses on social interactions in STEM classrooms with the goal of equitable student participation in disciplinary practices. He uses conversation analytic approaches for pragmatic ends, helping teachers and teacher educators reshape classroom interactions toward the goal of equity and social justice in their work of everyday teaching.
Contact Email: byunsun3@msu.edu
Julie Christensen is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education program at Michigan State University (MSU) with a focus on science education. Her work focuses on understanding how preservice and practicing teachers learn to enact equitable and responsive science instruction and the resources they use to do so. Her experience includes facilitating professional development, classroom-based educational research, and teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels within the Department of Teacher Education at MSU.
Contact Email: jachris@msu.edu
