Bulletin Board

Scott Franklin co-organized and led the 2025 Professional-development for Emerging Education Researchers Field School. Twenty-six faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students from around the country came to RIT to learn education research theory and methodologies and apply them to their individual research projects.

Christian Cammarota presented a poster at SABER in Minneapolis: “Student engagement with a computational activity evidences biological and computational sensemaking.”

Crystal Uminski attended the Science Communication Education Research Network (SCERN) inaugural meeting and presented a poster, “Y-shaped chromosomes, heterozygous chromatids, and mis-sized genes: Easy edits can clarify the misconceptions commonly found in published scientific figures.”

Crystal Uminski, Kate Wright, and Dina Newman published “Biology exams rarely use visual models to engage higher-order cognitive skills” in PLOS One.

Christian Cammarota gave a talk at the Open Science in Undergraduate Education Symposium hosted by the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington.

Dina Newman presented a poster at The Grading Conference, a virtual meeting about alternative grading practices that are focused on equity and authentic learning. “Feedback-First Grading: A modified standards approach to put the focus back on grades and improve learning.”

Sachmpazidi, D., Van Dusen, B., & Henderson, C. (2025). Role of departmental support structures and self-efficacy on physics student persistence: An examination of students’ experience from 19 physics graduate programs. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 21(1), 010158

SoPA Assistant Professor, Diana Sachmpazidi together with co-authors Ben van Dusen and Charles Henderson, has published an article in Physical Review - Physics Education Research titled "Role of departmental support structures and self-efficacy on physics student persistence: An examination of students’ experience from 19 physics graduate programs"

Multiple CASTLE members presented at SABER East, held at RIT! Christian Cammarota, Mike Foster and Mike Verosek gave short talks. Crystal Uminski gave a shark tank pitch and presented a poster.

Dina Newman published a paper, “Examining the Influence of Vision & Change and a mentoring network on teaching philosophies and strategies” in the Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education.

Drs. Crystal Uminski, Kate Wright, Dina Newman and several undergraduate researchers, in collaboration with Dr. Mingyu Yang of UC San Diego, published “Showing the Bonds--A Subtle but important difference in figure design that may alleviate student confusion about ATP hydrolysis” in micropublication Biology. https://micropublication.org/journals/biology/micropub-biology-001540.

Drs. Crystal Uminski, Kate Wright and Dina Newman published a paper, “Sketchy understandings: drawings reveal where students may need additional support to understand scale and abstraction in common representations of DNA” in the Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education. https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.00070-25

Ben Zwickl with University of Oslo collaborator, Tor Ole B. Odden, published "How physics students build computational literacy by creating computational literature" in the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Crystal Uminski received the RIT College of Science Excellence in Scholarship Award for her postdoctoral research.

Crystal Uminski, postdoctoral researcher working with Dr. Dina Newman and Dr. L. Kate Wright, presented her research “Assessing Visual Literacy Skills in Molecular Biology” at the University of Washington Biology Learning and Teaching Seminar.

Scott Franklin and Alia Hamdan presented “Attending to our Humanity: Empathy in Times of Conflict and Uncertainty” in the Haverford College “Meeting the Moment” discussion series. The moderated discussion explored their journey navigating their research and relationship in the context of Israeli/Palestinian crisis with a focus on implications for academic collaboration in the current political environment.