Director, NEON, Inc. Board of Directors: Dr. Carol Brewer

Carol A. Brewer, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and former Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Montana. As a professor, her major areas of research and collaboration included the comparative functional morphology of plants and plant physiological ecology, and how to better connect teaching with student learning in the life sciences. In 2010, she founded the Prairie Ecotone Research Group, LLC (www.PrairieEcotone.com), a firm that provides consulting, assessment, and research services for scientists and educators in the life sciences. Over the past 25 years, Brewer has led dozens of workshops on teaching, assessment, and mentoring. In 2009, she co-chaired the national invitational conference on Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology, and led the writing of the resulting conference report published in 2011 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (www.visionandchange.org). Brewer has served on the editorial boards of the journals Conservation Biology and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, and was a vice president of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and a member-at-large of the Board of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS). Currently, she serves on the National Advisory Board for the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, and on the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Biological Sciences Advisory Committee. She was part of the founding team, and currently serves on the Board of Directors, of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). In 2007, Brewer received both the Eugene P. Odum Award for Ecological Education from the Ecological Society of America and the AIBS Education Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences.