Carla Zembal-Saul, Ph.D., is the Principal Investigator for Science 20/20 Project:  Bringing Language Learners into Focus Through School, Community, University Partnership. She is the Kahn Endowed Professor of STEM Education in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research agenda is focused on how pre-service and practicing elementary teachers learn to orchestrate discourse-rich scientific and engineering practices in their instruction, evidence-based argumentation in particular (Avraamidou & Zembal-Saul, 2010, 2005; Emig et al., 2014; Haefner & Zembal-Saul, 2004). Zembal-Saul is committed to practitioner inquiry in teacher education and intentionally connects research and practice in her work with teachers. She is heavily involved with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), and hosted two webinar series on teaching the NGSS in elementary classrooms in 2014-15, and she was also recognized as a NSTA Fellow in 2015. Zembal-Saul served on the Committee for Strengthening Science Education through a Teacher Learning Continuum, which recently published their report, Science Teachers’ Learning: Enhancing Opportunities, Creating Supporting Contexts (NAP, 2015). She will be responsible for providing leadership and expertise as they relate to the science professional learning opportunities for teachers, administrators, community educators, and parents. Zembal-Saul’s expertise in design-based research allows her to provide leadership in the development and implementation phases of the PD and research plans, as well as qualitative studies on teacher learning and development (Zembal-Saul, 2009). In addition, she has developed online case-based learning platforms for teachers through an NSF CAREER grant , positioning her to direct the development of the online PD platform.

May Lee is the project coordinator for the Science 20/20 Project:  Bringing Language Learners into Focus Through Community, School, University Partnership. May is an Instructor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The Pennsylvania State University.  She facilitates courses on teaching English learners. Through her project work, May works with in-service and supervises pre-service teachers engaged in professional development opportunities centered on ways to support and challenge their Emergent Bilingual students’ academic growth. With more than 17 years of teaching experience at various levels including elementary and middle school, and university levels, May’s main areas of instruction are centered on the instruction for English learners. May has taught in various places around the world including Hong Kong, Ecuador, and Columbia. Her current research is focused on ways to support Emergent bilingual learning through the use of professional development opportunities for in-service and preservice teachers.

Dr. Megan Hopkins, Ph.D., is the external evaluator for the Science 20/20 Project:  Bringing Language Learners into Focus Through Community, School, University Partnership. Dr. Hopkins is Associate Professor in the Department of Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is a formal bilingual elementary school teacher, and has conducted extensive research examining how schools and school systems organize for equity, with particular focus on the education of immigrant and multilingual students. In studies funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition, the Spencer Foundation, and the W.T. Grant Foundation, she has investigated the implementation of language policies and ELD course placement policies, as well as content-specific curricular reforms. She has also engaged in context-embedded teacher professional development focused on fostering science learning opportunities for multilingual learners in the early elementary grades.