The College of Education of P-16 Integration recognized Dr. Angela Chapman as recipient of its 2022-2023 CEP Faculty Spotlight in Research. The key goals of this series are to celebrate and recognize CEP faculty members’ significant accomplishments in research; cultivate a research enterprise by fostering research conversations among faculty members; and stimulate interest in research. The Research Council, which is a sub-committee of the College Council, selected Dr. Chapman for her accomplishments and successes in research.
Dr. Chapman began teaching in 1991, with experience at the secondary and postsecondary levels. After earning her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on Science Education, she moved to the Rio Grande Valley and became part of the UTPA/UTRGV faculty. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning within the College of Education of P-16 Integration, Director of Engaged Scholarship & Learning, and serves as the current Co-Director of the UTeach program. Through her work, she has developed, implemented, and tested curriculum that leverage students’ cultural and linguistic capital to better learn science and mathematics. This is particularly important for students whose native language is Spanish.
Dr. Chapman’s experience working with external grants stems back to her early years of teaching in Middle School, in which she applied to and received a classroom grant from the Toyota Foundation for $10,000. Since receiving the classroom grant, Dr. Chapman has continued applying for and successfully being awarded multiple grants, including multimillion dollar grants that are creating new opportunities for students.
In recent years, Dr. Chapman has served as Co-Principal Investigator on two important funded grants for UTRGV. The NSF sponsored UTRGV Center for Equity in Engineering: Engage, Educate, Enrich (CEE-E3) grant received funding in the amount of $1,199,998.00 and the center opened on October 1, 2022 on the Edinburg Campus. In 2021, the UTRGV CREST Center for Multidisciplinary Research Excellence in Cyber-physical Infrastructure Systems (MECIS) opened with an NSF grant in the amount of $5,000,000. This grant will continue to support the annual UTCRS STEM Summer Camps that as described by Dr. Chapman, has already impacted the community greatly throughout the last decade by engaging “thousands of students from high schools and middle schools” from the Rio Grande Valley in railway safety.