Heidi Schweingruber

Heidi Schweingruber, Ph.D., is the director of the Board on Science Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), where she oversees a portfolio of work that includes K-12 science education, informal science education and higher education. Schweingruber joined the board in 2004 as a senior program officer. In this role, she directed or co-directed several projects including the study that resulted in A Framework for K-12 Science Education (2011), which served as the blueprint for the Next Generation Science Standards. She also directed a review of NASA’s pre-college education programs in 2008 and co-directed the study that produced the 2007 report Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8. Schweingruber is a nationally recognized leader in leveraging research findings to catalyze improvements in science and STEM education policy and practice. She presents widely on her work. Prior to joining NASEM, Schweingruber worked as a senior research associate at the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education. She was also the director of research for the Rice University School Mathematics Project, an outreach program in K-12 mathematics education, and taught in the psychology and education departments at Rice University. Schweingruber holds a Ph.D. in developmental psychology and anthropology, and a certificate in culture and cognition from the University of Michigan.