Cynthia Wei
Teaching Professor
Cynthia Wei is a Professor of Teaching and Director of Science Education in the Walsh School of Foreign Service’s Program in Science, Technology and International Affairs. Here, she leads the Science For All (SFA) program within the SFS and teaches several SFA courses, as well as an environmentally themed Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing. She is a member of the Bee Campus team, whose aim is to enhance pollinator health, abundance, and education on campus, as well as the cross-university DC Coalition of Higher Education for the Environment, Resilience, and Sustainability (DC-CHEERS). She is a co-PI and lead on education and training with the NSF-funded Verena Biological Integration Institute on viral emergence, an interdisciplinary team of researchers working to better predict and prevent pandemics. Previously, she served as a co-editor for the Ecology and Biodiversity section of the journal, Case Studies in the Environment. Her past scientific research involved animal cognition; she researched behavior and navigation in honeybees during her PhD, and social cognition in corvids as a postdoctoral research associate. More recently, she was the Associate Director of Education at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). In this role, she led and managed educational programs including the SESYNC undergraduate research internship and postdoctoral fellowship program, as well as initiatives to broaden participation with underrepresented minorities and to advance teaching of socio-environmental synthesis with the case study method. This built on her experiences working on national level science education initiatives as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education, and as a Christine Mirzayan Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences. She has also taught science at the K-12 level. She has a PhD in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior, and Zoology from Michigan State University, and a B.A in Biology with a concentration in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University