Rebecca Sansom has a rather unique hobby—bird watching—that enables her to practice her scientific skills outside of the classroom.
“[Bird watching] is like a puzzle,” Sansom said. “You have to use a lot of scientific skills—making careful observations, learning the ways birds are classified, and identifying certain key characteristics—It’s a challenge.”
Luckily for her, she has joined the BYU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry this fall—giving her the duck pond on south campus to practice bird watching and a classroom to help students solve science puzzles.
“So far, BYU is wonderful,” Sansom said. “I’ve found that the people here are very friendly and very good at what they do. It’s an overall positive environment.”
Sansom received her BA and MA in chemistry from Boston University in 2001 and Harvard University in 2005, respectively. In 2013 she received her M.Ed. from Southern Utah University. Though she originally planned to receive her PhD from Harvard, as she neared the end of her master’s program, she decided to pursue her passion for teaching instead.
“I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives,” Sansom said. “Teaching is an opportunity to help people live up to their potential and follow their dreams, gain confidence, and be successful.”
She has been teaching ever since. Sansom taught high school in Belmont, Massachusetts for several years, in addition to teaching part-time at Harvard. More recently, she taught concurrent enrollment courses at Bingham High School in Utah. Immediately prior to her arrival at BYU, Sansom was serving as an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation, where she worked with programs related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) teacher preparation.
At BYU, Sansom hopes to continue to help students solve science puzzles and, in the meantime, solve the puzzle of the chemistry classroom. She plans to use her classroom as ground zero for her research on effective laboratory instruction in chemistry as she redesigns the freshman laboratory course, Chemistry 107. Sansom also hopes to continue making a difference by increasing recruitment and retention of women in STEM majors and by recruiting talented STEM majors to become STEM teachers.
“I love interacting with students,” Sansom said. “I think, in part, it’s because when I was a chemistry student, I had a great mentor. . . . I found that when I was in graduate school, when I was teaching, and I was a TA, that I really liked the experience of being in the classroom with students. I [found that] I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives.”