Please join us for a casual conversation over juice, bagels, and hard boiled eggs to discuss how assessment can be used to increase student learning, expand our understanding of teaching and learning, and focus our instructional professional development. From The CREATE for STEM website (http://create4stem.msu.edu/people/diane-ebert-may) University Distinguished Professor Diane Ebert-May provides international leadership for discipline-based biology education research that integrates life sciences and cognitive science. She promotes professional development, assessment and improvement of faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students who actively participate in creative research about teaching and learning in the context of their scientific discipline. Ebert-May’s research group developed and tested a model for professional development workshops based on learner-centered teaching. They continue to investigate the impact of undergraduates’ design and use of models to build conceptual connections across scales in biology and are following students’ progress through a sequence of the major’s biology curriculum. Ebert-May leads FIRST IV, an NSF-funded professional development program to help postdoctoral scholars create and teach their first introductory biology course in preparation for their future academic positions. Her book, Pathways to Scientific Teaching (Ebert-May and Hodder eds), is based on active learning, inquiry-based instructional strategies, assessment and research. She teaches plant biology, introductory biology to majors in a large enrollment course, and a graduate /postdoctoral seminar on scientific teaching. Ebert-May is a AAAS Fellow and was recently awarded the Carnegie Foundation & CASE–US Professor of the Year, MI 2011, and received the AIBS Education Award in 2012. Her plant ecology research continues on Niwot Ridge, Colorado, where she has conducted long-term ecological research on alpine tundra plant communities since 1971. Education: BS University of Wisconsin (Botany), MA and PhD University of Colorado (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology).