North Carolina A&T State University associate professor and chairwoman in the Department of Biology, Dr. Mary A. Smith has been selected to serve as a Vision and Change Leadership Fellow for Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE).

PULSE is a joint initiative of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the National Institutes of Health/NIGMS (NIH/NIGMS). Over the next year, selected fellows will work as a team to produce an implementation framework describing strategies for change within academic departments.

Smith is now part of a team of 40 fellows competitively selected from an application pool of over 250. The team’s goal is to stimulate systemic changes within biology departments at all types of post-secondary educational institutions, based upon the findings from the 2011 report Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action and other similar calls for transformation of undergraduate life sciences education.

The Vision and Change Leadership Fellows come from 24 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. They represent research universities, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive/regional universities, and two-year colleges.