Professor Susan Rundell Singer, the Laurence McKinley Gould Professor of Biology and Cognitive Sciences, currently serves as the Division Director in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation in Washington D.C. A leading expert on undergraduate education and plant biology, Singer merges work in public scholarship, academic civic engagement, teaching, biology, and educational policy.
Last week, Singer helped launch the NSF’s second annual Community College Innovation Challenge. The competition provides community college students with the opportunity to “propose innovative science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-based solutions to perplexing, real-world problems” (source: NSF). The theme this year focuses on intersections between food, energy and water systems. As Division Director of Undergraduate Education, Singer participates in this exciting and creative approach to improving national STEM education, which includes investing over $300 million annually in research and development work. Some of Singer’s other recent work includes speaking at colleges and universities around the country on pressing challenges in STEM education, leading representatives from 14 federal agencies in implementing the undergraduate goals of the Federal STEM Education 5-year Strategic Plan, serving as the NSF lead on a series of White House College Opportunity Workshops, and participating in developing the annual U.S. President’s Budget Request to Congress for NSF.
After being at the National Science Foundation for over two years, Singer has gained insight into the national world of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) policy and practice. One aspect of her work that she finds exciting is that she operates on large-scale national level, influencing improvements in how undergraduate students across the country are learning. Singer says that having “influence at that scale is deeply satisfying.” Scale is also her work’s biggest challenge: “You have many many stakeholders. We at the NSF are part of the executive branch . . . NSF reports to the President, we work with the Office of Science, Technology, and Policy. . . there are stakeholders across government . . . [and there is a] whole range of stakeholders in public and private sectors. . .” Singer emphasizes that researchers and policy-makers work to “really consider and listen to the needs of everyone and try to drive change in a way that’s built on evidence and generates evidence.”
In her current work, Singer and her colleagues are researching and designing strategies across federal agencies that address four major challenges in undergraduate STEM education: promoting active learning practices, increasing undergraduate student access to research opportunities, enhancing college-level math proficiency, and improving community colleges and the transition from two year to four year educational institutions.
Singer’s scholarship and teaching at Carleton greatly influences her current work with the NSF. Before coming to Washington D.C., she began engaging more public scholarship and integrating academic civic engagement into more courses. She even laid some of the groundwork for the work that the NSF is doing today with a study she led at the National Academies on Discipline-based Education Research. In her own words, Singer “literally moved to do the same work, but to go from the research side to the implementation side. . . All the pieces of what I do came together in an intellectual jigsaw that is very satisfying.”
For faculty and students interested in public scholarship opportunities, Singer emphasizes how engaged research is not “research-lite” but rather “driven by a passion around an issue . . . it needs to be deeply embedded in our own scholarly interests and skills.” She also points out that “you don’t have to move to Washington to do academic civic engagement work,” but can look for opportunities to create meaningful and reciprocal partnerships within local and state-wide communities. For Singer, public scholarship is about using “my research skills and experiences to contribute to solving or helping to solve a societal issue . . . not to look inward to the academy. . . [but] to bring the good of the academy out into the world to advance our understanding.” Public scholarship, she says is “not researchers coming in [like saviors]” but rather is a process in which people with different sets of skills come together around an issue or topic, with the goal of improvement.
Singer will be returning to Carleton early in 2017, and says she is “most grateful Carleton was willing to let me take this leave and have this opportunity” and hopes to bring back and share what she has learned.