Jo Anne Powell-Coffman, Professor and Department Chair of GDCB, was chosen in fall 2012 to be one of only 40 faculty in the nation to serve as a Vision and Change Leadership Fellow for the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) group. The group formed as a result of a report published in 2011 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), titled Vision and Change: A Call to Action.

Dr. Powell-Coffman, together with the other PULSE fellows, made significant progress in identifying, measuring, and supporting schools’ efforts to implement Vision and Change principles for exceptional life sciences education. After sharing her experiences and expertise, Dr. Powell-Coffman chose to take a sabbatical from her term as PULSE fellow in 2015, and to focus on projects here at ISU. The PULSE Community continues to work to improve undergraduate biology education. Their 2015 report, Vision and Change: Chronicling Change, Inspiring the Future, features an article about ISU undergraduate education titled, A Model for Emergent Change written by Dr. Powell-Coffman, with additional contributors Assistant Dean Ogilvie of the Graduate College; GDCB Professors Clark Coffman and Diane Bassham, and former GDCB HHMI Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Emily Elliott.

The PULSE program is a joint initiative sponsored by the NSF, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the National Institute for General Medical Sciences (NIGMS/NIH). Visit the NSF and AAAS Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education website for more information and links to all the reports.