Good morning,
I'm writing to share some good news for the CER community - and in doing so, I hope you will excuse me for bragging about one of my students.

As some of you may know, the RFP for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship competition expanded this year to include for the first time the category of "STEM Education and Learning Research." In other words, graduate students in CER (and PER, BER, etc.) were now eligible to compete for these prestigious awards.

Yesterday, the NSF released the list of the 2000 students who were awarded the Fellowships. (There were 158 awards in chemistry as a point of reference.) There were 23 awards in STEM Education and Learning Research, including 7 in science education. Of those 7, 5 went to students in schools of education, one to PER in a physics department, and one to CER in a chemistry department. Here's where the small boast comes in - Allie Brandriet, a second year graduate student here at Miami was the winner of that CER fellowship. 

Obviously I am very proud of Allie, but I wanted to send this along to the whole list because this is a big deal for our research community. Discipline-based education research (DBER, of which CER is one discipline) is now "welcome" in this important NSF funding opportunity. If you are a faculty member reading this, please encourage your first or second year graduate students to apply next year - 23 awards is just 1.1% and there is nowhere to go but up!

Thanks for reading.
Stacey



Stacey Lowery Bretz
Professor of Chemistry
Chair, Board of Trustees, ACS Examinations Institute

Miami University
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
651 E. High Street
Oxford, OH 45056

513-529-3731 voice
513-529-5715 fax
[log in to unmask]
http://www.users.muohio.edu/bretzsl