Dr. Mary Jo Parker is currently a faculty member in the Natural Sciences department at University of Houston-Downtown. She also directs the Scholars Academy, an academic unit in the College of Sciences & Technology supporting STEM majors through scholarships and a mentoring network system. She currently is PI on five active federal grant awards ($1.7M). She brings extensive experience in curriculum and development, supervision and leadership at K-12 and higher education, K-16 outreach and STEM recruitment, online instruction, and closing the achievement gap for minority STEM students. Dr. Parker has incorporated service learning into the University Seminar (Transfers) core course. She is piloting service learning in her online non-majors biology course currently.
