Brian Couch will be Susan J. Rosowski associate professor in biological sciences.
Couch conducts research on college science education and is a leader in discipline-based education research, which combines knowledge of teaching and learning with discipline-specific content to help facilitate student understanding. Couch has 48 high impact publications, including one focused on the implementation of new teaching practices in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and several in CBE—Life Sciences Education on assessing core concepts in biology. He has secured 14 external awards, 10 as principal investigator, for $20 million in external funding. Two awards of note are a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Inclusive Excellence grant for institutional change and a National Science Foundation award for vision and change in biology education. Couch has been a keynote speaker at numerous national conferences, received a major society award, and was an invited panelist to a National Academies round table. He is an editor of a major journal in his field and a senior editor of an open access journal focused on teaching resources in biology and physics. Couch leads the X-DBER Conferences put on by the Center for Science, Mathematics and Computer Education.