Beth Schussler (candidate for president-elect)
Professor
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
https://eeb.utk.edu/people/elisabeth-schussler/
History of SABER Involvement
I began attending SABER in 2013 and have attended and presented at the national conference every year since. I have served on the Invited Speaker and Awards Committee and reviewed conference abstracts. SABER has been a transformative professional organization for me, shaping my skills as a researcher and teacher. My PhD students and postdocs also found SABER a seminal influence, advancing their research and helping them establish professional networks. On a personal level, SABER has given me amazing professional colleagues and collaborators who sustain me in the “between times” when I return to my institutional BER island. My desire to run for president is motivated by all SABER has given me; now is a good time to give back.
Professional Activities Aligned with SABER Mission
I have extensive leadership experience at multiple institutional and professional levels. I am a Professor and Associate Head of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Tennessee, where I was hired as a BER faculty member in 2009. I spent ten years directing the Introductory Biology program, leading a curriculum alignment to Vision and Change. Afterwards, I spent three years in Faculty Senate leadership, including as Faculty Senate President. I currently serve as the faculty representative on the UT Advisory Board. At UT I have won three institutional teaching awards and am an Alumni Association Distinguished Service Professor. Professionally, I am a Monitoring Editor for CBE LSE and was just elected a 2025 AAAS Fellow.
Rationale for Interest in SABER Leadership
In my career, I have been an instructor, an informal educator, a BER faculty member, and a program director – helping me see BER from many different perspectives. My main priority would be advocacy: how SABER can support the work of the many members who may be the only person at their institution doing or applying BER. How can SABER as an organization advocate for the value of BER to those institutions? How can we help train and support those doing and applying BER without local colleagues? I also believe SABER needs to advocate for the value of BER tenure-line faculty, as those positions are not guaranteed to be replaced when current faculty retire. This would have cascading impacts on BER research, training, and application to teaching.
Recent Scholarly Contributions in Biology Education Research
I (and my students at UT and collaborators) have 55 peer-reviewed publications that have been generally centered in three areas: vision and change curriculum reform, student experiences in introductory biology, and graduate student professional development (GS PD) and experiences. Some of our most highly-cited work has been on student anxiety and instructor support in introductory classes, and we have presented this work at SABER over multiple years. I have a long-standing collaboration with colleagues affiliated with the Biology Teaching Assistant Project (BioTAP) which I founded in 2013. I am a Co-PI on two current NSF grants: one on departmental culture and GS PD and another on creating a holistic GS PD program.
