Alison Slinskey Legg

Alison Slinskey Legg, Ph.D., Teaching Professor and Center Director at the University of Pittsburgh, designs and leads interventions at scale to broaden participation in the STEM education to workforce pathway. Dr. Legg is the founding Director of the Broadening Equity in STEM Center which was designed to create a collective impact space that leverages expertise from academic and professional sectors to create STEM opportunities for all students. Dr. Legg serves as the Principal Investigator of the $10 million NSF INCLUDES ALLIANCE: STEM PUSH Network. Through STEM PUSH, Dr. Legg and her colleagues have created the first national network of pre-college STEM Programs that are using improvement science to broaden participation in STEM, with learnings and best practices published in both scholarly and practitioner journals. They are conducting the first large, cross-program study of the impact of pre-college STEM program experiences on student enrollment and persistence in STEM and pioneered a “next generation” accreditation model that credentials pre-college STEM programs around evidence-based quality standards.  Through STEM PUSH, Dr. Legg and her colleagues are working to make quality STEM education that happens in out-of-school-time pre-college programs recognized student achievement.

At Pitt, Dr. Legg founded an outreach program and partnered with regional school districts, community-based organizations and dedicated external funders to provide current STEM content to over 10,000 students per year.  She developed an outreach teaching lab at Pitt, Pitt-Kits curriculum and a mobile laboratory program that traveled to K-12 schools across the tri-state area.  Her teacher professional development program provided Pitt-kits curriculum and content updates to over 500 regional teachers/year and was the sole PD provider for biology teachers in many area school districts.  The summer laboratory research program that she co-developed and directed “Gene Team” was the feature of a PBS television pilot program “Science Mission 101”.  Dr. Legg developed the script and show content which won the Pennsylvania Excellence in Broadcasting Award for Children’s Programming in 2010.