Christian Selected for New Class of Governor’s Teaching Fellows

Laura Christian will spend the next year as a Governor’s Teaching Fellow, where she will work with other faculty members across Georgia to learn the latest approaches to teaching.

Created by Gov. Zell Miller and offered by the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia, the program selects a small number of instructors from Georgia’s public and private colleges each year to participate in a series of symposia and further develop their skills. The idea is to keep Georgia’s faculty members at the leading edge of instructional practice.

“I am looking forward to working with the other instructors in the program,” said Christian, a lecturer in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “I have learned so much about teaching from working with others in the past, and I'm excited to continue learning.”

Christian joined the Coulter Department in August. She has been working to reimagine the Department’s approach to BMED 3600, Physiology of Cell and Molecular Systems. In the fall, she will teach the course with a problem-solving studio similar to some other undergraduate classes.

“This course format is not commonly used in cell and molecular biology courses, so I am looking for different experiences and ideas to bring to my teaching at Georgia Tech. The Governor's Teaching Fellows program brings together a cohort of instructors from different institutions and different fields to support and learn from each other,” Christian said.

Along the way, Christian also is running a study examining students’ content knowledge and motivations in the course, and she’s planning to expand that effort to compare the new problem-solving studio approach to the traditional course format.

Christian is the sixth Georgia Tech faculty member named a Governor’s Teaching Fellow since the program’s inception in 1995 and the first from Coulter BME. She joins a roster of past fellows from 45 different institutions across Georgia and 75 different disciplines.