Kathy Malone

Fellowship Placement: National Science Foundation
Cohort: 2013-2014

Kathy Malone has been a teacher for over 25 years. She has taught biology, physics and chemistry in urban, rural and suburban secondary schools having started her teaching career in New Orleans, Louisiana. Kathy has a PhD in instruction and cognition with a concentration in physics education from Carnegie Mellon University.

During her Fellowship, Kathy was assigned to the National Science Foundation (NSF), Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division on Research and Learning in Formal and Informal Settings, Discovery Research K-12 Program (DRK12). At the NSF, she participated in the DRK12 grant award process from helping to draft the call for proposals, assigning proposals to panels to assess their quality, awarding of final grants and analyzing grants awarded based on several parameters.

The Fellowship impacted her career trajectory by rekindling her desire to do K-12 educational research. After her Fellowship, she was offered an Assistant Professorship in Science Education at The Ohio State University. In this position, she has been involved in developing, teaching and researching Modeling Instruction Pedagogy in biology and implementing STEM/STEAM units at the K-8 level. Her work is supported by several state and federal level grants In addition, she teaches undergraduate and graduate STEM courses, such as Elementary Science Methods and STEM assessment, to K-12 pre-service teachers.