About Us

Deborah Tatar

D. Tatar

Dr. Tatar is Associate Professor of CS and, by courtesy, Psychology, at VT, a Fellow of the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology, and a member of the Center for HCI. She was previously a Senior Software Engineer at DEC, and a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC. She has been a principal on 10 prior NSF grants, and has a Google h-index of 27. She has engaged in Participatory Design with teachers and implemented classroom- based, educational, socio-technical interventions in California, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Texas and Virginia. Her prior work includes a large multi-year project conducted in Texas schools in partnership with the School of Education at UT Austin. Her interest in CT dates back to her employment at the Logo Lab at M.I.T. and her 1986 LISP textbook.
Felicia Etzkorn

fetzkorn

Dr. Etzkorn is Professor of Organic Chemistry at Virgnia Tech. Her main research concerns the structure-function interactions proteins with small molecules. She has been the sole PI on 3 major NIH grants, one NSF grant, and multiple smaller grants. She participates in two major NIH biomedical training grants for underrepresented students. She has also created a Green Chemistry course for senior undergraduates at VT, and has implemented a series of middle school chemistry explorations.
Victor Sampson

vsampson

Dr. Sampson is an Associate Professor of STEM Education in the College of Education at UT Austin. Dr. Sampson is an expert in instructional design, argumentation, assessment in science education, and teacher professional development (he has trained over 1000 teachers in the use of ADI). Dr. Sampson has extensive experience with both quantitative and qualitative research methods. In addition, he recently completed two successful development and innovation projects funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, one as a PI (#R305A100909, $1,062,000, 2010–2014) and one as a Co- PI (#R305A100782, $1,156,000, 2010–2014).
Stephanie Rivale

S. Rivale

Dr. Rivale is research faculty member in the College of Education at the UT Austin. She has collaborated on engineering education research with both the VaNTH ERC and UTeachEngineering. During her masters work she conducted atmospheric chemistry research and was a teaching assistant for general chemistry.
Aakash Gautam

A. Gautam

Aakash is a graduate student in Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He has previously worked at PayPal as a software engineer. He is interested in developing interactive learning technology.