Aug 13, 2026
Kathryn Henion
Researchers from the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering played leading roles in organizing the inaugural Upstate New York Discipline-Based Education Research Conference, held June 11-12 in Weill Hall on Cornell’s Ithaca campus. The conference brought together faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students from community colleges, liberal arts colleges and research universities across New York to build interdisciplinary partnerships in undergraduate STEM education while highlighting Cornell’s growing engineering education research community. The event also convened the broader Cornell Center for Interdisciplinary Discipline-Based Education Research (CIDER) cohort, supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CIDER grant.
“The goal was to set the seeds for future collaboration and explore what the barriers are, as well as what could enable more work across institutions,” said Maggie Webb, a postdoctoral researcher in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering.
Among those organizing the conference were Webb; Cara Robertus, a postdoctoral researcher in engineering education in the R. F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; and Austin Zuckerman, a postdoctoral researcher in biology education. Together with colleagues from Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, they designed the conference to foster collaborative discussions that encouraged participants to identify new research partnerships and address shared challenges facing discipline-based education researchers. Organizers plan to synthesize ideas generated during the conference into a report or white paper to guide future statewide collaboration.
