Finalists selected for Center for Teaching and Learning executive director

University of New Mexico Associate Provost Bill Stanley has invited three finalists to campus for the position of executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. The finalists include Megan Elwood Madden, Joshua Eyler and Trey Conatser. Each candidate will meet with faculty, staff, students and the community during their visit.

Finalist biographies

Megan Elwood Madden
Megan Elwood Madden earned her Ph.D. in Geoscience from Virginia Tech, followed by a BS in Geology from UIUC. She is currently the director of the Center for Faculty Excellence, the comprehensive hub for faculty development at the University of Oklahoma (OU) and holds the Robert & Doris Klabzuba Chair in the School of Geosciences, where she teaches courses in geochemistry, planetary science, and science communication. As a core affiliate faculty member in Women's and Gender Studies, she also co-teaches a course on gender and identity in STEM.

During her term as chair of OU's Faculty Senate, she worked with campus leaders to launch several campus-wide initiatives, including the Teaching Evaluation Working Group, which successfully developed the new campus-wide Course Reflection Survey as well as multi-context teaching evaluation rubrics that recognize and reward professional growth and evidence-based practices. Within the Center for Faculty Excellence, Madden continues to lead efforts to develop effective resources designed to support faculty across all disciplines and ranks as they work to strengthen their teaching, service, research, and creative activities. Madden and her team have made significant progress towards improving, diversifying, and marketing inclusive teaching workshops, consultations, and online resources that center student learning, reaching over 500 faculty in 2023. Additionally, she serves as a core member of OU Elevate, a recently funded NSF ADVANCE IT project working to develop more equitable and effective faculty reward systems.

Campus Visit
Monday, July 29

Open Presentation
Monday, July 29 at 9:45 a.m., Student Union Building (SUB), Lobo A

Joshua Eyler
Josh Eyler is the director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning and Director of the Quality Enhancement Plan for Critical Thinking in Gen Ed Courses at the University of Mississippi, where he is also a clinical assistant professor of Teacher Education. Prior to joining UM, Eyler was the founding director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University, associate director of the teaching center at George Mason University, and a faculty member at Columbus State University, where he was awarded tenure in 2011.

Eyler is the author of the book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching (West Virginia University Press, 2018), which was named a "Book of the Year" in the Chicago Tribune. His forthcoming book, Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It (Johns Hopkins University Press), will be out in August and tackles one of the most urgent issues in education today--grading and alternative assessment.

Campus Visit
Tuesday, July 30

Open Presentation
Tuesday, July 30 at 9:45 a.m., Student Union Building (SUB), Lobo A

Trey Conatser
Trey Conatser is director of the University of Kentucky Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT), which works across all colleges and administrative areas to foster effective, engaging, inclusive, and innovative teaching and learning. Conatser has worked as part of CELT since 2016 and in that time has led initiatives relating to pandemic-era support and operations, programming and guidance around creating more inclusive and equitable educational opportunities, transdisciplinary courses and skills, student peer tutoring on multimodal assignments, international faculty development, designing and launching new online programs, and the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Over the past few years, he has overseen a significant growth and diversification of CELT services to meet the needs of instructors and students across the University.

At Ohio State, he began working in educational development as part of the storied Digital Media and Composition Institute. Broadly, Conatser's research examines theories, practices, critiques, and innovations for technology-enhanced learning in the humanities and beyond; specifically, he has investigated the relationship between computer code and writing pedagogy. His work can be found in publications such as College Teaching, Computers and Composition Online, the Journal of Digital Humanities, and the Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities.

He has recently presented at venues such as the POD Network Annual Conference, Times Higher Education's Digital Universities US, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, and the Teaching and Learning with AI Conference, and has contributed to coverage of higher education in Forbes, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and The Atlantic. Conatser has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in technical and professional writing, first-year/college writing, digital humanities, literature, and college teaching and learning.

Conatser holds a Ph.D. in English from The Ohio State University with a specialization in writing, rhetoric, digital humanities, and pedagogy. He also holds a master's in English from the University of Nebraska with a specialization in creative writing and poetry.

Campus Visit
Thursday, Aug. 1

Open Presentation
Thursday, Aug. 1 at 9:45 a.m. in the Student Union Building (SUB), Lobo A

Further information on the candidate visits, including CVs and feedback forms, can be found on the Executive Search Webpage.

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