Ann Russell
Iowa State University, IA·Education Research
Many of the hardest problems in biology, from conserving biodiversity to managing land, have no single clean answer. They require students to think across scales and disciplines and in a global context.
- Fields
Education Research
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
tropical ecology
undergraduate biology education
open educational resources
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Internationalize undergraduate biology teaching by supporting faculty in creating open educational resources (OERs), free online teaching modules, built on field and research data from tropical ecosystems.
- Enhance the open-source Gala platform, working with its developers, the Midwest Big Data Hub and Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis, so modules can include interactive and quantitative data-analysis elements.
- Run incubator workshops to draft new tropical ecology modules and faculty mentoring networks to help instructors adapt existing ones, producing author guidelines and toolkits for module development.
- Broaden participation in the biology community by recruiting network participants from under-represented groups, historically Black colleges and universities, and community colleges, and engage professional societies to sustain the network.
More about the research
Tropical ecosystems are a natural classroom for that kind of complexity, combining very diverse species communities with social and economic pressures that shape conservation outcomes. Yet most introductory biology curricula still teach mainly through temperate-zone examples, and instructors lack ready-made, freely available teaching materials grounded in real tropical field research.
Why it matters
Undergraduate biology students rarely encounter the global range of ecosystems or the messy social and economic sides of conservation. Free, ready-to-use modules built from real tropical research could let instructors at any institution, including community colleges and HBCUs, bring that material and its quantitative reasoning into existing courses, broadening who participates in biology and offering a model other STEM fields could copy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
MacKenzie Stetzer
University of Maine, ME·Education Research
Conduct a scoping review of published open educational resource (OER) articles to measure how well they cover Vision and Change core concepts and skills, use active learning, and advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Mindy Reynolds
Washington College, MD·Education Research
Establish FAMNet, a structured co-mentoring network that pairs faculty experienced in evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) with faculty mentees across two-year and four-year colleges.
Emily Lovell
University of California-Santa Cruz, CA·Education Research
Expose HBCU computer science students who have completed foundational coursework to open source career pathways through paid summer contributions to real-world open source software projects matched to their interests.
The school
Iowa State University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $462M a year on research, 327 research doctorates a year.
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