Stephanie Chasteen

March 25, 1972 ~ November 3, 2024

Stephanie Viola Chasteen succumbed to an aggressive glioblastoma in Louisville, Colorado on November 3rd, 2024, at the age of 52. She bravely fought this cancer for one year with the support of her doctors at Kaiser and the Mayo Clinic, and her family and many friends. When the cancer ultimately prevailed, she accepted her fate with dignity and grace.

A member of AAPT since 2006, Chasteen made extraordinary contributions to physics education, having served as a consultant on over 50 STEM education projects, helping departments and faculty take up new practices that embrace educational innovations. Although many of her contributions have been as an external evaluator, she also contributed significantly to educational workshop design and translating research to teaching practice in numerous settings. Chasteen was passionate about the power of external evaluation to have meaningful impacts on the world.

As an external evaluator, Chasteen worked behind the scenes to help project leaders enhance the impact of national-scale efforts such as the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop (NFW), Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC), Get the Facts Out (GFO), and Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) – as well as dozens of smaller projects. Her broad background and keen eye led her to make significant intellectual contributions to these projects along with concrete suggestions of how they can improve.

Chasteen received her Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco. She was an activist in educational reform, sparked by her time at the Exploratorium and further informed by her time in the Science Education Initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her communication skills were enhanced through an early career in science journalism, including an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Fellowship at National Public Radio.

Prior to graduate school, Chasteen served in the Peace Corps in Guinea West Africa where she learned the local language, Pular, and helped establish a rural Health Clinic which was subsequently named in her honor. The first-born child at the clinic was named “Stephanie”. She later established the “Friends of Guinea” organization and set up their website. She was a giver and routinely made lunches for the homeless in Boulder, CO. She loved contra dancing, hiking, canyoneering and technical climbing which she shared with many good friends over the years.

Through her business, Chasteen Educational Consulting, Chasteen, aka the “Science Geek Girl”, worked with universities throughout the US in various capacities to help faculty improve the teaching of physics using evidence-based methodologies. In recognition of her lifetime of contributions improving the teaching and learning of physics, she received the 2024 Lillian McDermott Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). In 2024, she was also inducted as a fellow of the AAPT and a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Her legacy of educational reform has impacted thousands of students and their mentors.

In her role as a communicator, she authored and made significant contributions to many enduring and influential works, including a podcast on teaching and learning physics, popular articles hosted by PhysPort, the assessment section in the EP3 Guide, the Science Education Initiative Handbook, and the influential white paper “How to work with external evaluators,” hosted on the AAPT website.

In her most recent work, she played a pivotal role in the redesign of the Faculty Teaching Institute (FTI, the successor to the New Faculty Workshop), shifting the focus of this workshop from hearing from multiple experts to organizing around developing reflective teaching practices. Because of her work on this project 100’s of new physics faculty will start their teaching careers with more pedagogical knowledge and a reflective mindset, positively impacting 1000’s of students.

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