Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Selected
IUPUI Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Faculties Uday Sukhatme is pleased to announce the selection of Prof. Pratibha Varma-Nelson as the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Chemistry, pending approval by the IU Board of Trustees. Varma-Nelson is a Professor of Chemistry at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), Chicago. For the past two years, she has been on academic leave from NEIU in order to serve as a Program Director in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation.
Varma-Nelson will assume her new duties at IUPUI on August 15, 2008. She brings to the position many years of academic and administrative experience. She has served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry, Earth Science and Physics at Northeastern Illinois University from 2002 to 2006. Prior to that from 1979 to 2002, Varma-Nelson was a faculty member at Saint Xavier University, Chicago. She is the author of numerous scientific papers on research funded by a wide variety of federal sources. Pratibha Varma-Nelson will bring to IUPUI a national reputation for enhancing the learning of students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines through a collaborative learning structure called Peer-Led-Team-Learning (PLTL). As one of the founders of this NSF Systemic Change Initiative and follow-up Dissemination Projects, she has helped to advance this active learning environment, with documented evidence of dramatic improvements in student learning in over 100 institutions here and abroad. Over 20,000 students a year participate in this new pedagogy in science and other disciplines. Varma-Nelson has also participated in a US delegation to China in 1995 on Emerging and Successful Pedagogies in STEM through the auspices of Project Kaleidoscope. In 1998 she was a member of a delegation from the American Chemical Society that went to Cuba to participate in their third National Chemical Congress. Varma-Nelson is also a co-founder of the NSF funded Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (CASPiE), a collaboration among Purdue University, Northeastern Illinois University, University of Illinois in Chicago, Ball State University, and several community colleges.
Varma-Nelson received a Bachelors of Science in Chemistry in 1970 from Poona University, India and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1978. She will succeed Dr. Megan Palmer, who has been serving as the Interim Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning since July 2006.
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