The Department of Biology would like to extend congratulations to Dr. Jennifer Geib. She and Dr. Linda McCalister of the College of Education recently received a $265,000 from NC QUEST for a program they developed, Content Area Literacy-Western North Carolina. (CAL-WNC). CAL-WNC will provide professional development for middle school science educators with the goal of improving adolescent science literacy. This will help ensure students are "college and career ready" by the end of high school. Twenty -five middle-school science teachers from eight nearby public school systems will learn strategies for facilitating adolescents' interpretation of diverse science texts and communication through multimodal writing, incorporating instructional technology to enhance literacy learning, and disseminating knowledge and skills gained to regional colleagues via peer-coaching. Over 1500 students will be impacted by this grant.

North Carolina Quality Educators through Staff Development and Training (NC QUEST) is a competitive grant process through which funds allocated by the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Title II-A: Improving Teacher Quality state grants) are awarded to North Carolina institutions of higher learning for the purpose of teacher professional development.

Dr. Geib joined the Department of Biology in 2010. Her areas of interest include Science Education and Ecology.