Advancing STEM Education across Maine

I’m a high school STEM educator, teacher-author, curriculum developer, and researcher with more than a decade of experience in science and STEM education. With a background in geology and engineering, I’ve built my career around helping students experience science as something they can investigate, design, question, and use to understand the world around them.

I currently teach high school Chemistry, Physics, and Honors Computer Science, where I combine rigorous science instruction with laboratory investigation, project-based learning, engineering design, and computational thinking. I also developed and launched a project-based computer science program that includes animation, video game design, and Computer Science Principles.

Beyond my classroom, I’m actively involved in STEM education research and computer science leadership. I serve as a Co-Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded CS4ME initiative, working with educators, researchers, industry partners, and other stakeholders to develop research-informed approaches for integrating computer science across existing curriculum. My work also includes developing instructional resources and providing professional development that helps educators bring computer science and computational thinking into their classrooms.

My research experience extends into science education through NSF-supported chemical bonding research. As a Research-Practice Partnership member with UMaine’s InterChemNet project, I contributed to Modeling Chemical Bonding for Middle School Classrooms and the CORE (Chemical Observations, Representations, Experimentation) Learning Cycle, connecting scientific modeling, observation, and experimentation with the way students develop an understanding of chemistry.

I’ve also had opportunities to bring aerospace and engineering into my work as an educator. While teaching in Florida, I participated in two NASA educator programs, including the NASA STEM Bootcamp for Florida Teachers, and incorporated aerospace-focused engineering design and inquiry-based learning into science instruction. More recently, I mentored high school students through the USM CubeSat Competition, where our team was selected as a finalist in 2023.

As the creator of FitzSTEM, I also develop classroom resources for high school science educators. My work draws directly from my experience teaching Chemistry, Physics, Computer Science, and interdisciplinary STEM, with an emphasis on rigorous, engaging resources that teachers can realistically use in their classrooms.

My work is now expanding into children’s science writing as well. As a teacher-author, I’m interested in the intersection of science, storytelling, and curiosity, and in creating opportunities for young readers to begin wondering about scientific ideas long before those ideas appear in a high school textbook.

Across all of these roles, my philosophy remains remarkably consistent: students should have opportunities to do science, not simply learn about it. Whether I’m teaching in the classroom, conducting education research, developing curriculum, mentoring students through an engineering challenge, or writing, my goal is to make complex ideas accessible without taking away the challenge, discovery, and curiosity that make STEM worth exploring.