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 educational research with colleagues in various disciplines. We are engaged in the same activities as faculty members and thus understand the pressures faculty face in fulfilling their various roles and responsibilities.
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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 Support at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, and an Instructor in the Department of Statistics. He received his doctorate in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon in 2001. His main responsibilities at the Center include individual consultations with Teaching Assistants and Graduate Student Instructors as well as centralized programs (graduate student teaching seminars, the classroom observation program, the documentation of teaching development program, the graduate student reading group on pedagogy, and the teaching portfolio working groups).
Dr. DiPietro’s scholarly interests involve the application of learning sciences to enhance college teaching, diversity in the classroom, student ratings of instruction, teaching in times of tragedies, and statistics education.
He has served on the board of directors of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, the premiere faculty development organization in North America.
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.
Dr. Aimée A. Kane is a Teaching Consultant and Research Associate at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, as well as an adjunct professor of organizational behavior at the Tepper School of Business, at Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her doctorate in Organizational Behavior and Theory from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon in 2004. Prior to joining the Eberly Center, Dr. Kane served for five years as an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Her research, which has received support from the National Science Foundation and has been published in leading organizational journals, best paper proceedings, and books, investigates the impact of social identity (i.e., a psychological sense belonging to a group) on knowledge consideration, transfer, and creation within and across work groups. At the Eberly Center, Dr. Kane draws on this expertise in the social and cognitive dynamics underlying group learning and years of teaching at New York University and Carnegie Mellon in order to help faculty maximize the functioning of and learning in student groups. In addition to consulting with faculty who wish to advance student learning by improving their teaching, she designs and conducts seminars and workshops that bridge the gap between teaching practice and the research on groups and learning.
