The National Center for Science and Civic Engagement is pleased to announce that Eliza Jane Reilly is the new Executive Director. Most recently, Eliza served as Deputy Director of Programs, and has been involved in the NCSCE and SENCER community since its inception.
Eliza Jane Reilly has two decades of experience in the design and implementation of programs and materials to advance curriculum, academic leadership and faculty development. She has served as the Executive Director of the American Conference of Academic Deans and as a Director of Programs at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, where she was one of the original staff members for the SENCER initiative. In the last decade she has focused on campus-based faculty development and curricular integration through directorships of the Center for Liberal Arts and Society and the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College, where she also had a faculty appointment in American Studies. Eliza holds an MA in the History of Art and a PhD in American History from Rutgers University. In addition to her supervisory role as Executive Director, Eliza will continue to serve as the General Editor of the SENCER Models and co-Editor of Science Education and Civic Engagement: An International Journal.
In his recent note to the community outlining the plans for NCSCE’s leadership succession, NCSCE Executive Director Emeritus Wm. David Burns noted the following about Eliza:
Beyond the CV packed with positions and experience is a larger truth. Eliza’s main contributions to our work have come from her brilliance as a thinker and her generosity. I have always said that knowledge is one of a small group of commodities that you can give away without losing what you have given away. Eliza has given consistently and generously, over a long period of our collective time together in SENCER and related endeavors. A historian whose work has focused on art, American pragmatism, and ideas of modernism, Eliza has been a master builder of the intellectual and moral framework that has guided our efforts.
Now, with our help, she can continue to apply her gifts to the work that needs to be done, to explore new opportunities, make new alliances, strengthen existing ones, and gain resources and support to continue what we have begun. I know you will join me in extending to her your congratulations and support and pledging to do your part, especially as we imagine and enact ways to guarantee that what has been available to you will be, in a continuously refreshed and refined form, available to you and your successors as well.
Eliza is Research Professor in the Department of Technology and Society at Stony Brook University, the institution that hosts NCSCE and its initiatives. You can reach Eliza by email at eliza.reilly@stonybrook.edu or eliza.reilly@ncsce.net.