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Who We Are

The Center for Advancing Scholarship to Transform Learning is a network of faculty, projects and programs engaged in scholarship surrounding STEM education.

Led by director Dina Newman, CASTLE is comprised of STEM faculty, research associates, instructional service professionals, and communication experts. Together they form a network of skilled individuals committed to the Center’s mission of advancing STEM teaching, learning and evaluation. Members work together on research and programs engaged in scholarship of pedagogy, facilitating dialog, encouraging collaborative opportunities in evidence-based practices, conducting discipline-based education research and establishing methods of assessment and evaluation.

Research

Dina Newman and Leslie Kate Wright standing with 6 students.

Research Groups

Several faculty members gathered around a table, having a discussion.

Journal Club

A large group of people sitting in a lecture hall for a presentation.

Seminar Speaker Series

A group of students posing for a photo with Dina Newman and Leslie Kate Wright.

Research Experience for Undergraduates

News

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A beginner’s guide to using coding to enhance (bio)chemical education

This full-day workshop will be offered at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education in Madison, Wisconsin. Participants will learn basic Python syntax, Google Colab (with Gemini AI assist), and GitHub. The goal is to leave the workshop with a classroom exercise ready to go!

CASTLE researchers publish on how faculty build empathetic relationships

Alia Hamdan, Ash Bista, Dina Newman and Scott Franklin published “How and why physics faculty share their identities with students: Four personas” in Physical Review - Physics Education Research (2026). The second in their 3-part “Empathy Trilogy,” the paper explores how faculty share aspects of their identity in order to build empathetic relationships so as to better support students.

CodeBMB: Computational Literacy for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education

This introductory six-hour workshop will introduce faculty members with all levels of coding skill to the use of coding in their classroom. The focus will be on pedagogy, needs of the community and some basics of Python syntax, with examples of data analysis and plotting. This is the first of three workshops and will be followed by workshops on "learning to code" and "teaching with code."

CodeBMB: Computational Literacy for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education

This four-hour virtual crash course (sponsored by the Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine at Rutgers University) is designed to introduce novices (with little or no coding experience) to a pedagogical foundation for coding, the Google Colab environment, GitHub, and the fundamentals of Python scripting. A link for registration will be shared on this site as soon as it is available.