Dr. Sarah Frey joins us from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she served as the Assistant Provost for Educational Innovation and was involved in shaping campus strategy and providing campus-wide support for innovations in classroom and online education. Dr. Frey previously served as Executive Director of the Texas Institute for Discovery Education in Science at the University of Texas at Austin. As part of that role, she oversaw the Freshmen Research Initiative (FRI) - a program in which over a thousand first-year students each year participate in an authentic, multi-semester research experience as an extended part of faculty research groups.
Dr. Frey spent 10 years of her career at the University of California, Irvine, where she served as a member of the mathematics faculty and as the Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. While at UCI, she led a couple NSF interdisciplinary undergraduate research grants in computational applied mathematics and mathematical biology. She won the Mathematical Association of America's 2011 Alder Prize for excellence in teaching and multiple campus teaching awards. Dr. Frey earned her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Arizona in 2004, studying problems in non-linear elasticity related to planetary tides.