Louise Mead is an academic specialist in the Department of Integrative biology, originally trained as an evolutionary biologist, with a broad range of teaching and administrative experience. She holds an MS in Science Education and a PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. Prior to moving to a full time appointment in the Department of Integrative Biology Louise served as the Education Director for the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, an NSF funded Science and Technology Center at MSU for 10 years. In this role she also served as lead PI or co-PI on a number of educational research projects that grew out of BEACON seed funding.
Louise is currently the Graduate Program Director in the Department of Integrative Biology, where she also teaches an introductory biology course for non-life science STEM majors as well as IBIO355L Ecology Lab. It is the goal of her work in the Ecology Lab in collaboration with the Lilly Fellowship to further integrate the use of R and RStudio into the curriculum so that students have the coding and quantitative skills to perform more sophisticated analyses on long-term data we are collecting through field research, which we believe will better prepare our majors for careers in fields of ecology and evolution. Louise has published her scientific work in journals such as Evolution and Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and her education research in CBE Life Sciences and Evolution: Education and Outreach.