Executive Biography

Dr. Jennifer Cartier is the Executive Vice President of Distance Education. Prior to joining the faculty at Unity, Dr. Cartier was the Director of Teacher Education and a Science Education faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh where she was recognized with the Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Carnegie Science Foundation Excellence Award for University/Post-Secondary Education. Dr. Cartier has published research exploring the relationships between science teachers’ professional identities, instructional materials, school contexts, and the enacted curriculum. Her work has been published in a variety of professional journals, including School Science and Mathematics, Science and Children, and Science and Education. Dr. Cartier co-authored the chapter Developing Understanding Through Model-Based Inquiry in the seminal NRC publication How Students Learn (2005) and Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Task-Based Discussions in Science (2013).

Throughout her career, she has been awarded more than $7M in grants to support science education research and curriculum development. Since joining the faculty at Unity in 2014, Dr. Cartier has enjoyed teaching a variety of courses related to pedagogy, learning, the socio-politics of education, and sustainability. Dr. Cartier is thankful that her career has brought her back to her native state of Maine after more than two decades of work in academia in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and enjoys spending time with her extended family and searching for sea glass on beach walks whenever she can.

Dr. Cartier received her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction and M.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her B.A. in Chemistry with a concentration in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Williams College.