Susan Lowes

Dr. Susan Lowes is Director of Research and Evaluation at the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has conducted research on teaching and learning at both the K-12 and university levels, including many online initiatives, and has evaluated multi-year projects funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education (PT-3, FIPSE, TIGC, 21st CCLC, and TAH), NSF (ITEST, IGERT, REU, GK-12), private foundations, and city and state governments. She has served on Department of Education and NSF Advisory and Review panels and was Co-PI on a NSF-funded GK-12 Project awarded to Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering. Her research focuses on engineering education; on online teaching and learning, particularly at the K-12 level; and on geography education.

Dr. Lowes joined the staff of ILT in 1996 to work on a number of professional development initiatives and curriculum projects, including the Living Schoolbook Project, the Reinventing Libraries Project, and the Seneca Village Project (with the New-York Historical Society). In 1998 and 1999, she worked with museums, archives, and libraries as Coordinator of Web Resources and Curriculum for a Technology Innovation Challenge Grant to District 1’s American Gateways Project, and served as a consultant to the New York State Archives and Records Administration’s Erie Canal Project, the North Hudson Electronic Education Empowerment Project’s museum-school initiative, the Twin Tiers Coalition for Learning’s professional development program, the National Council for Research on Women, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the United Nations CyberSchoolBus. From 1999 through 2001, she was a manager of Curriculum and Professional Development for ILT’s Eiffel Project. In 2001, she became Director of Research and Evaluation. From 1997 through 2003, she was also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at the Hunter College School of Education of the City University of New York, teaching courses on curriculum and technology. She is currently Adjunct Professor in the program in Communication, Computing and Technology in Education at Teachers College, where she teaches courses on research methodologies and on virtual schooling.

Dr. Lowes received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1994, with distinction. Her dissertation, “The Peculiar Class: The Formation, Collapse, and Reformation of the Middle Class in Antigua, West Indies, 1834-1940,” was nominated for the Bancroft Dissertation Award. She has done fieldwork throughout the Leeward Islands and in London, England, and attended the M.A. program in anthropology at Hunter College before moving the Teachers College, where she received her M.Phil. Her work on Antigua can be found at antiguahistory.net.