John M. Burns Conference

 

Keynote Speaker

Ann E. Austin is a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University (MSU), where she has been a faculty member in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education in the College of Education since 1991. She has recently served as Interim Vice Provost and Associate Vice President for Faculty and Academic Staff Affairs (2022-2023), and she previously served as Interim Dean of the College of Education (2021-2022), Associate Dean for Research (2016-2021), and Assistant Provost for Faculty and Academic Staff Affairs (2016-2021). She has been a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) (2015-2016), a U.S. Fulbright Fellow (1998, South Africa), and President of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), and she is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

She was one of the co-founders of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), a collaboration of more than 40 universities, which, with funding from the NSF, has prepared several thousand doctoral students over the past twenty years to be excellent teachers as well as strong researchers. Dr. Austin served for seven years as Co-Chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ Roundtable on Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education.

Her international work in higher education has taken her to more than fifteen countries. Her research concerns organizational change in higher education; academic work, careers, and professional development; creating more inclusive academic workplaces; teaching and learning issues in undergraduate education; doctoral education; and STEM education. Her current and recent National Science Foundation-funded projects have focused on gender equity in academe, teaching preparation of future STEM faculty, improving teaching evaluation, and organization change networks. Dr. Austin has published extensively, and she and her colleagues have a book on teaching evaluation that will be published by Harvard Education Press in fall, 2025.