Meet the Staff - WISE
Faculty
DR. JESSICA VANDENPLAS
WISE Faculty Director
Jessie is an associate professor of chemistry at GVSU. She received a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the Catholic University of America in 2008, after completing an MS in Forensic Science at the George Washington University, and a BS in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research is focused in the area of chemistry education, and uses educational and psychological methodologies to investigate student learning in chemistry. Current research is focused on using eye-tracking techniques to examine student problem solving and cognitive load in chemistry, as well as the use of technology in the classroom.
DR. MELISSA TALLMAN
WISE Faculty Fellow
Lissa Tallman joined the GVSU biomedical sciences department in 2012. Her research focus is on human and primate evolution and specifically on the evolution of human and primate locomotion. Her current research is a mixture of laboratory based studies of primate soft tissue variation and quantitative analysis of shape and field based studies at her fossil site in the Tatacoa Desert in Colombia.
DR. KATHRYN HALEY
WISE Faculty Fellow
Kate is an assistant professor in the department of Biomedical Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on pathogen host interactions. Currently her research aims at understanding how bacteria gain access to nutrient metals during infections and how bacterial metal homeostasis drives disease progression.
DR. LAURA KAPITULA
WISE Faculty Fellow
Laura currently serves as an associate professor of Statistics at Grand Valley State University. She earned a PhD in Statistics and a MS in Cognitive Psychology from the University of New Mexico. Her focus as an educator is the effective teaching of statistics with a focus on statistical computing and modeling. Her research interests include education statistics and evaluation, hierarchical modeling and longitudinal data analysis, influence diagnostics, epidemiology and statistical graphics. She is a highly experienced applied statistician and consultant who has had the opportunity to work collaboratively in many diverse content areas including: education, medicine, transportation research, human computer interaction, epidemiology and psychology.