Who We Are
Our Expertise and Experience
The Eberly Center brings twenty-three years of experience and diverse disciplinary perspectives to bear on teaching and educational issues. Our staff includes two cognitive psychologists, a cultural anthropologist, a civil and environmental engineer, an historian, a social psychologist, and a statistician. All of our staff members have doctorates, teach classes, advise students, serve on committees, write proposals and conduct and publish research (albeit to a lesser degree given our other responsibilities). We are engaged in the same activities as faculty members and thus understand the pressures faculty face in fulfilling their various roles and responsibilities.
Dr. Susan Ambrose is Associate Provost for Education, Director of the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, and Teaching Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon. She received her doctorate in American History (1986) from Carnegie Mellon and has been on the Eberly Center's staff since it's inception. Her responsibilities include advising the Provost and the Vice Provost for Education on educational issues, conducting institutional research on learning, identifying and responding to changing needs to continually improve the quality of education at the university, maintaining overall operation of the Eberly Center, and overseeing the Intercultural Communication Center and the Office of Academic Development.
She has designed and conducted seminars and workshops for faculty and administrators throughout the United States and in India, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Chile. In 1998 and 2000 she was named a Visiting Scholar for the American Society of Engineering Education and the National Science Foundation, spending time with the engineering colleges at the University of Washington-Seattle, Rice University, and Tufts University. She was also awarded an American Council on Education fellowship for 1999-2000 and worked alongside the presidents of Connecticut College and the University of Rhode Island to learn more about leadership styles.
She has received funding over the years from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, the Lilly Endowment, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Eden Hall Foundation. More recently she received funding from The ALCOA Foundation to study the faculty experience at Carnegie Mellon.
She serves on the advisory boards for the Journal of Engineering Education and the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education at the University of Washington. She also serves on the Carnegie Museum of Art Education Program Committee. She has served on accreditation teams for the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
She is co-author of The Woman's Guide to Navigating the Ph.D. in Engineering and Science (2001) with Barbara Lazarus and Lisa Ritter; Journeys of Women in Engineering and Science: No Universal Constants (1997) with Kristin Dunkle, Barbara Lazarus, Indira Nair and Deborah Harkus; The New Professor's Handbook: A Guide to Teaching and Research in Engineering and Science (1994) with Cliff Davidson; and numerous chapters and journal articles. She also teaches courses on immigration in the Department of History.
Michelle Pierson is the Administrative Assistant for the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence. She is responsible for overseeing the management of the Center, handling correspondence and seminar pre-registrations, and monitoring financial records. Michelle has been with Carnegie Mellon since 1983.
Dr. Marsha Lovett is Associate Director, Faculty Development, for the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Associate Research Professor in the Department of Psychology. She received her doctorate in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon in 1994. Her main responsibilities at the Eberly Center include consulting with faculty who wish to improve their teaching, as well as planning and organizing programs for faculty, such as Incoming Faculty Orientation.
Much of Dr. Lovett's applied research involves studying learning at the college level and then finding ways to improve it. She has studied high school and college students' learning in several disciplines, including geometry, physics, matrix algebra, programming, and statistics. For example, her work in statistics led to the design and development of StatTutor, an intelligent tutoring system that helps students learn to solve data-analysis problems. StatTutor is used by hundreds of college students at Carnegie Mellon and several other high schools and colleges around the country.
She has published more than 30 articles and chapters on learning and instruction and is co-editor of the book Thinking with Data. In recent years, she has received funding form the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Pew Foundation.
Dr. Michele DiPietro is the Associate Director for Graduate Student Support at the Eberly Center. Originally from Pescara, Italy, he received both his master's and doctorate in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon. He steps into his new role from his previous positions in the Eberly Center as a Teaching Fellow and Coordinator of Graduate Student Support. DiPietro's main interest is diversity in the classroom. Working from theoretical models, he seeks to derive strategies to make the classroom a safe, welcoming and respectful environment for all students, especially women, racial minorities, lesbian and gay students, adult and returning students, and international students. DiPietro is also interested in exploring pedagogically sound technologies for teaching. He is currently restructuring the Eberly Center's Documentation of Teaching Development program to include both a diversity and a technology track.
Dr. Anne Fay is the Director, Assessment, for the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and the Office of Technology for Education, and an Adjunct in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon.
She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1990) and was awarded a post doctoral research fellowship from the James A. McDonnell Foundation in Cognitive Studies in Educational Practice. From 1993 - 1997 she was a research associate at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh where she served as a principle investigator on assessment projects for the Society of Automotive Engineers and the Children's Television Workshop, and as a co-investigator on a grant from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. From 1996 - 2001 she served as a Visiting Professor in the psychology department at CMU where she taught courses in research methods as well as cognitive and developmental psychology.
Her research is in the area of cognitive and developmental psychology, with a particular focus on the development of reasoning and problem solving skills, and the application of cognitive theory to educational practice. Her current focus is on developing formative and summative assessments for programs and courses at Carnegie Mellon.
Dr. Michael Bridges is the Associate Director of Educational Support at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, and an Adjunct in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Carnegie Mellon, with a primary focus on stress, coping, personality and motivation. Dr. Bridges has worked with a variety of clinical populations including amputees, cardiac patients and young women living with breast cancer. More recently he served as the Operations Director and a Senior Analyst at the Survey Research Program at the University Center for Social and Urban Research at the University of Pittsburgh. In his current position, he bring his professional background in social psychology, survey design, survey methodology and questionnaire development to the broad body of expertise at the Eberly Center.
Dr. Marie Norman is a Teaching Consultant and Research Associate at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, as well as an adjunct anthropology professor in the History Department at Carnegie Mellon. She received her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Anthropology in 1999, where her doctoral research, funded by a DOE Fulbright grant, focused on the impact of tourism on caste relations in Pokhara, Nepal. At the Eberly Center, Dr. Norman consults with faculty who wish to improve their teaching and is involved with a number of research and writing projects, including studies of undergraduate student experiences at Carnegie Mellon and research investigating the impact of various technologies on teaching and learning. She is particularly interesting in issues concerning international students, international faculty, and adjunct faculty. In addition to her work with the Eberly Center, Dr. Norman teaches courses on medical anthropology, tourism, and South Asia, and co-edits the anthropological journal, Ethnology. She also serves as an academic advisor for the Bachelor of Humanities and Arts Program at Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Norman is committed to applying anthropological approaches to practical problems, and has conducted qualitative research studies for St. Margaret's Hospital and Allegheny College,and has served as a consultant for Fathom Designs.
