Stephanie Marie Williams

Stephanie Williams is a graduate student at the University of Maryland pursuing a Ph.D. in education. As an undergraduate student Stephanie was heavily involved in her local UMD SPS chapter, as a member, then the Outreach coordinator, and finally as the president. She was also an SPS summer intern in 2018, working for the Center for History of Physics in College Park, MD under the mentorship of Dr. Greg Good.

Stephanie graduated with a degree in astrophysics from UMD in 2019 and took a year to pursue qualitative physics education research. Continuing her education in the fall of 2020 as an education Ph.D. student at UMD, she plans to continue her physics educational research and work to bring equity to the physics classroom. She also currently works as the Lead Physical Science Educator for the Carnegie Academy of Science Education in D.C.

Outside of SPS Stephanie has been involved in numerous organizations including Women in Physics, Access Assembly Network, the UMD makerspace, International Women In Physics Conference team, SSTEM scholars program, etc.

SPS Alumni Information

SPS Chapter: University of Maryland-College Park

Stephanie Marie Williams is available for student engagement in the following categories: mentoring, in-person speaker, virtual speaker, job shadowing. Send a request using this form .

Alum Location: Adelphi, Maryland
Education Level: Bachelors
Disciplines: astronomy

Job Sector: academia
Recent position: Graduate Student, University of Maryland
Job Description: I work as a graduate student in the education department at UMD. I work primarily in qualitative research, focusing on discourse analysis. I currently work on two different research projects, which are aimed at learning more about how faculty learn to be good teachers. This involves interdisciplinary educators, faculty teaching preservice physics teachers, pedagogical styles, and equity noticing in the classroom. At the Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE) I work as the lead instructor for the First Light middle school science program. I am the sole curriculum developer and the lead classroom instructor. The program focuses on teaching astronomy, physics, and programming for free to middle school students through a critical lens. This means I structure this content to be taught intentionally as equitably as possible, and describing the social-cultural influences of these fields and their development.