Melissa McCartney

Melissa McCartney, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology and the STEM Transformation Institute. Dr. McCartney's research interests center on primary scientific literature and how it can be used as a teaching and learning tool. This research stems from her main project, "Science in the Classroom," as a Senior Project Director in the Education and Human Resources (EHR) Directorate at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). "Science in the Classroom," is a resource that aims to make scientific research articles more accessible to students and the public. Previously, Dr. McCartney spent five years at Science Editorial working on education and neuroscience manuscripts and was a Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academies where she worked with the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine. In her academic life, Dr. McCartney was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Neurology at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where she examined network dynamics in the hippocampus; specifically with regards to seizure generation in epilepsy. Dr. McCartney completed her PhD in Neuroscience from The George Washington University and has a BS in Biochemistry from Binghamton University (SUNY).

Research Areas

Scientific practices are the methods that scientists use to ensure that their findings are valid and includes learning to ask questions, analyzing and interpreting data, engaging in argument from evidence, and synthesizing scientific knowledge.One available resource to help students learn scientific practices is primary scientific literature. Reading and deconstructing primary scientific literature essentially allows students to experience the logic of moving from a problem or question to a set of data to a new conclusion. The long term goal of my research is to use scientific literature as an educational tool in order to highlight and promote scientific practices.