Aaron Brower
Victoria Robinson
Katherine Cramer Walsh
Aaron Brower received his PhD in 1985 (Psychology and Social Work) from the University of Michigan and joined the faculty of the School of Social Work & Integrated Liberal Studies at University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1986. Dr. Brower's research focuses on post-secondary educational attainment, college life, and college success. He has developed programs for this university and others that help students succeed in college through the integration of their in-class and out-of-class experiences. He is also an expert in creating and supporting learning communities.
Dr. Brower has been involved in numerous campus initiatives focused on improving student learning and building learning communities. At UW–Madison, he was one of the founders, and was the faculty director, of the Bradley Learning Community, a dynamic residential living-learning program for first-year undergraduates. He is the co-faculty director of the Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning, a learning community program which encourages science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduate students and post-docs to apply their research talents both to the development of their own teaching skills and to the advancement of undergraduate education. Dr. Brower was recently named the Vice Provost for Teaching & Learning at UW-Madison.
Victoria Robinson is a senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies and Academic Coordinator of the American Cultures Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Robinson holds a PhD and M.Phil. in Political Geography from the University of London. She also conducted post-doctoral work in Comparative Migration Systems and Policy Formation at Oxford University and University College London where she studied the relationship between de jure and de facto migration policies within the European Union. In 2000, she was a Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California studying the effects of border control on gendered migration across the southwest border. Her current research is as varied as interrogating the teaching of multiculturalism within the college classroom, to the local political effects of return migration of women to former sites of out-migration from the Caribbean. In 2003–04, she was awarded a Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship to redesign core courses taught in ethnic studies to include library research components. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship on Undergraduate Research at Berkeley, and also the Teaching, Learning and Technology Committee at Berkeley.
Katherine Cramer Walsh is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dr. Cramer Walsh is a proud alumnus of that department and the School of Journalism, having received her BA from there in 1994. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2000. She was happy to return to UW–Madison, given the university’s commitment to the Wisconsin Idea. She teaches courses on public opinion, political communication, political psychology, and a service-learning course on civic engagement. UW-Madison has also been a welcoming setting for her to pursue her research interests in civic engagement and the way ordinary folks make sense of politics. She is the author of Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2004), Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference (forthcoming this spring, University of Chicago Press) and, with the members of the American Political Science Association's Task Force on Civic Engagement and Civic Education, Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Have Undermined Citizenship and What We Can Do About It (Brookings, 2005).
