Dr. Mark Baillie is the Director of the STRIVE Program in the STEM Education Center and an Associate Professor in the Chemistry Program in the School of Physical Sciences. He is a leader in the National Institutes on Scientific Teaching, both running week-long workshops for college faculty on how people learn and steering the national organization as a member of the executive committee.

His research can be categorized as “institutional change” research related to how people learn. While we understand that how people learn is tied to so many factors before you arrive on campus, there are also so many factors that we as faculty can control in the classrooms. He leads professional development programs for college faculty on how people learn and also studies how those training programs impact classroom environments, and how those lead to changes in student success.

In a current collaboration with Drs. Jan Springer and Arya Basu their work is building capability to use the audio levels in a classroom to measure changes in faculty teaching practices over time. This work is based on the Decibel Analysis for Research in Teaching (DART) algorithm developed by Drs. Tanner and Owens (PNAS article 2017), and pushes the concept forward with new advances in computer science.