Welcome to the 2025 SABER Elections
Below are the candidates for the 2025 officer election. Each position carries a three-year term. The President role includes one year each as President-Elect, President, and Past President.
Voting will be open from June 1-30, 2025. All SABER members in good standing are eligible and encouraged to participate.
Questions can be directed to current Past President, Kelsey Metzger, at kmetzger@umn.edu
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Candidate List for President-Elect Erin Dolan
Jenny Knight (withdrawn)
A. Kelly Lane
Michael Moore
Candidate List for Treasurer
Stephanie Gardner Catherine Kirkpatrick
*Clicking on a candidate's name will take you to that candidate's information*
Candidate's names are listed in alphabetical order by the candidate's last name.
Candidate Bios
*Listed Alphabetically by Last Name*
Erin Dolan (candidate for president-elect)
Professor
University of Georgia
https://spree.franklinresearch.uga.edu/
History of SABER Involvement
I have been a part of SABER since it was envisioned. SABER is now a robust organization with a thriving membership. For me, SABER supports connections with friends and collaborators and facilitates networking with new colleagues. SABER provides an important environment for early career and other emerging BER scholars to learn and grow in their work and as professionals. I have mentored undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers in their engagement with SABER, including presenting posters and talks about their research, reviewing abstracts, and serving on committees. I am thrilled that numerous graduate and postdoctoral researchers I have mentored continue to actively engage in SABER and are now mentoring others in doing so.
Professional Activities Aligned with SABER Mission
I have been a proud member of the BER community for almost 25 years now. I was one of its founding members, helping to articulate its early mission, vision, and operations. I have been an engaged member of SABER since its inception. As Editor-in-Chief of CBE - Life Sciences Education (LSE) for ten years (2010-2020), I collaborated with SABER leadership to support both new and established BER scholars in developing and showcasing their work. I have attended the annual meeting almost every year and reviewed abstracts until it became important to give space and voice to up-and-coming scholars. I believe my deep knowledge of SABER and my experience with BER capacity building will be useful to SABER as the organization continues to mature.
Rationale for Interest in SABER Leadership
I believe SABER is achieving goals related to generating evidence that informs biology education and fostering a sense of collegiality among members. I see opportunities to make additional progress toward its other goals. As president, I hope to strategically lead further dissemination of BER findings and further development of emerging BER scholars. I would accomplish this by working with SABER leadership and membership to strengthen relations with dissemination partners and enhance capacity to design, conduct, and report high quality, impactful BER.
Recent Scholarly Contributions in Biology Education Research
In the past year, my group has published multiple peer-reviewed papers in LSE and has additional papers related to BER published in other journals as well as manuscripts in review or revision. Our group has produced robust tools for measurement in BER, such as our Mentoring in Undergraduate Research Survey. Our group has also produced evidence that is informing the design and implementation of course-based undergraduate research experiences and mentorship during research training in the life sciences. In the past year, I have given six invited talks on our research at colleges and universities across the country. These talks are hosted by life science departments, providing additional avenues to raise awareness of and familiarity with BER.
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Stephanie Gardner (candidate for treasurer)
Associate Professor; University Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Fellow
Purdue University
https://www.bio.purdue.edu/lab/gardner/
History of SABER Involvement
My SABER involvement includes attending the annual meeting since 2012, presenting work from my research group and collaborations in every format, serving as an abstract reviewer, chairing the invited speaker committee (2019-21), participating in the Physiology SiG and the PEER network, and collaborating to start the Mary Pat Wenderoth (MPW) Lectureship Award. I have benefited immensely by having a network of friends and scholars to share and discuss research and education with. More importantly, with my involvement I have been able to support and recognize others including supporting developing scholars (e.g., having a trainee on the invited speaker committee) and recognizing senior scholars with the MPW Lectureship Award.
Professional Activities Aligned with SABER Mission
I have diverse experiences in leadership and service which will enable me to support and strengthen SABER as a member of the Executive Committee and as Treasurer, specifically. I am an active BER scholar, a PULSE (Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education) Fellow, a monitoring editor at LSE, and I have served SABER in numerous capacities. Beyond managing budgets and identifying revenue streams for my own research program I have experience creating a marketing plan to garner support and partnerships. For example, as a Provost's Fellow I have obtained conceptual and financial support for a Summit aimed at identifying strategic programmatic areas for investments for a coordinated strategy for undergraduate research and mentoring
Rationale for Interest in SABER Leadership
I am indebted to SABER for providing a community of friendly critics and supporters that have made my research stronger as well as supporting the careers of members of my research group. I have seen first-hand how SABER has transformed from a small group of champions to a full-fledged professional society that provides mechanisms for community, professional development, and a venue for dissemination of research findings to improve biology education. As Treasurer I will work with SABER leadership and members to identify new revenue streams and partnerships to sustain SABER's important leadership and operations and allow us to take advantage of opportunities that arise to strengthen and potentially expand the impact of our community.
Recent Scholarly Contributions in Biology Education Research
Research in my group focuses on the knowledge and approaches used when engaging in science practices. A long-standing research area is revealing practices used during the analysis and graphing of biological data. Findings from this collaborative work have been disseminated via presentations at SABER including in the SABER PDET series in January 2025, invited university talks and workshops, as well as in research articles and book chapters. Our insights have informed instructional resources including an Evidence-Based Teaching Guide at LSE. Other research areas in my group include examining features of mechanistic explanations, conceptions of hypotheses and predictions, and interdisciplinary collaboration and identity development.
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Catherine Kirkpatrick (candidate for treasurer)
Teaching Professor
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
http://cbs.umn.edu/btl
History of SABER Involvement
I have been a member of SABER since 2013 and have attended the annual meeting multiple times over the years, presenting posters at some of them. I have also served as an abstract reviewer for the annual meeting for the last 3 years. I enjoy the opportunity to learn about the latest biology education research and to interact with members of this vibrant community.
Professional Activities Aligned with SABER Mission
I am a Teaching Professor in the Department of Biology Teaching & Learning at the University of Minnesota. I lead the instructional team for our Foundations of Biology laboratory sequence and direct the second course, which offers CUREs (course-based undergraduate research experiences) to all students majoring in the College of Biological Sciences. I contribute to CURE Teaching Assistant professional development as a member of the steering committee for the TAPESTRy program. In addition, I have served as a board member and Treasurer for a small non-profit organization (Calliope Women's Chorus) for the past 9 years, so I am familiar with the requirements of the Treasurer role.
Rationale for Interest in SABER Leadership
My specific interest in taking on the Treasurer role centers on serving and giving back to the SABER community. I believe that my prior experience as the Treasurer of a non-profit gives me a skill set that can be beneficial to SABER. More broadly, I believe SABER plays a critical role in fostering and disseminating biology education research, and I am eager to support efforts to bolster the implementation of evidence-based practices in undergraduate biology education. As a long-term member of my departmental DEI working group, I am also interested in fostering an inclusive community.
Recent Scholarly Contributions in Biology Education Research
The Foundations of Biology lab course I direct includes multiple research areas, both computer-based and wet lab-based, within the same overall course structure. This provides unique opportunities for biology education research projects, including comparisons across the different topic areas. In collaboration with colleagues in my department, I have authored three biology education research articles, plus a fourth article currently in revision, that investigate aspects of student learning in a large-scale CURE lab setting.
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A. Kelly Lane (candidate for president-elect)
Assistant Professor of Biology Teaching and Learning
University of Minnesota
https://sites.google.com/umn.edu/laneresearchgroup/home
History of SABER Involvement
I have attended the SABER national meeting for approximately 10 years. Each of those years either myself or multiple members of my research group (i.e., students and postdoctoral researchers) have presented at the conference. Over the years, I have spent time on the DEI committee and the mentoring committee. I credit SABER with the fact that I am in this field. As a graduate student, my advisor invited me to SABER as an opportunity to see if discipline-based education research was of interest to me long-term. I found a community of passionate people who did impactful work and who shared my values around science communication, student-centered teaching, and the role that quality biology education plays in society. It is my academic home.
Professional Activities Aligned with SABER Mission
In both my research and my service, I’ve focused on DEIJ and institutional change, partnered with my own ongoing unlearning. Through these efforts, I’ve learned that developing robust and equitable institutions requires open communication and authentic relationships. Evidence shows that building these relationships takes intentional co-creation of vision, which I’ve done in service roles in my department and university-wide. I will employ skills I have gained to help SABER engage in values-based decision making that includes all members of our community. This will require developing shared vision and tackling challenges imposed by systemic power structures of universities that devalue teaching-focused positions and teaching in general.
Rationale for Interest in SABER Leadership
SABER will face many challenges in the coming years including how we continue to do research and best serve our students and trainees. Our strength is that our community has a wealth of knowledge and evidence that will help us weather this storm and can offer guidance to universities, societies, and our peers. I believe that we could do more to share our knowledge and perspectives with both the public and with each other. Through community building within and beyond our current members, we can create collective power and voice that individuals may lack. Initiatives like the DBER-SiT supported new podcast Digging DBER are the kinds of creative thinking we need to foster. I want SABER to be a strong and stable voice in this tumultuous time.
Recent Scholarly Contributions in Biology Education Research
I have published over 20 BER publications, presented at several conferences both education-focused and biology research focused and, in my first four years as a faculty member, have been awarded three NSF research grants, one NIH training grant, and a grant from the Norwegian Research Council. I have conducted research on topics such as adoption of evidence-based instructional practices, students transition to college STEM, and graduate students’ development of teaching identities. Now, my research focuses on how we can teach biology topics more accurately and equitably including how we teach genetics to combat essentialist thinking related to race and how we teach sex/gender to combat incorrect narratives around binary sex.
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Michael Moore (candidate for president-elect)
Director of Undergraduate Research and Mentoring
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
History of SABER Involvement
Being a part of SABER means two things to me, being part of a community that: 1) is caring, supportive, and prides itself on helping each other become the best versions of themselves and 2) that unapologetically pursues equity and justice for our students and colleagues in our colleges and universities. I have been a SABER member since 2016. I have experienced SABER as a graduate student, a postdoc, and a professor, giving me a diverse perspective on how SABER serves these groups and how we can do better. I have been an active SABER member serving as a founding member of DBER-SIT, an inaugural SABER steering committee member, a growth and development committee member, a conference abstract reviewer, and a SABER buddies team leader.
Professional Activities Aligned with SABER Mission
To disseminate, support, and grow the footprint of biology education research requires someone who can develop a vision for carrying out the organization's mission while following its values and helping guide folks into carers that best align with their interests and goals. As program director, I develop visions harmonizing community, local, and national goals. I have led workshops on such topics as: 1) grant writing, 2) transitioning into DBER research, 3) building and presenting research posters, 4) what you can do with a DBER degree, 4) improving teaching (MoSI), 5) creating inclusive meetings, conferences, and classes (iEMBER), and 6) how to use Learning Assistants in their classes. I've also worked on institutional change efforts.
Rationale for Interest in SABER Leadership
The common thread that connects everything I do on a national, regional, and local level all centers on two principles: 1) ensuring those around me have the resources and support they need to be successful in their careers and 2) celebrating them for the success they achieve. I believe these are two primary functions of the president of SABER. If I am fortunate enough to get elected as president, my primary goal will be to ensure all SABER members have a voice as collectively we seek to make SABER a place where all feel welcomed and valued. I have also been fortunate to hold office in several other professional organizations. These service opportunities have provided me with, 1) a network of experts and 2) a wealth of experience to draw on.
Recent Scholarly Contributions in Biology Education Research
Over the past several years, my scholarship has spanned areas such as building inclusive conferences, learning assistant training, 21st-century skill development, motivation for active learning in biology classes, the impacts of flipped learning, and building CURES. My current research interest is in understanding and measuring student inclusion perceptions and behaviors in STEM education. I have published 13 articles, presented 48 referred talks, and successfully co-PIed 3 NSF grants. Additionally, through providing such opportunities and direct mentoring and opportunities to attend writing retreats, I have been directly responsible for helping several other papers and grants get published and successfully funded.
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