Dr Angela Ziebell

I have project management and customer management experience working with industry, research institutes, government bodies and academia in the US (2007-2013) and Australia.  Originally used to manage multi-million dollar projects and tens of thousands of samples a year, I now use my program management skills in the Higher Education sector to bridge the gap between academia and the external employers where most of our graduates are destined.

I specialise in redevelopment of curriculum or the building and introduction of new subjects. Having just moved to Deakin in 2021 I took over half of first year chemistry and went straight into a redesign making extensive resources to support our students. I recently became the Driector of Work Integrted Learning too, an area which I am very passionate about supporting ensuring continued growth in the placements available to our students.

As I settle into my roles at Deakin I have three PhD students who have joined me to work on the use of context teaching learning and authentic assessment on student belonging by helping to develop career an  industry understanding and therefore employability.

In my last role, I coordinated two internship units that run year-round and "Career skills for Scientists" that runs twice a year. I also lead the introduction of an Indigenous Science unit and I was the first Indigenous Engagement Champion for the Faculty of Science at Monash. My research centres around the impact of career and employability education on undergraduate science students.

For 2016-18 I led a redevelopment program for Monash Chemistry's laboratory activities. "Transforming Laboratory Learning" brings Work Integrated Learning into 17 lab classes by working directly with industry to build context and inquiry into activities, better preparing students for the workplace. Authentic assessments such as executive summaries and QC reports are now used for learning and assessment alongside more traditional formats.

My technical experience includes designing and optimising high through-put chemical and biochemical assays, biomass analysis, natural product isolation, and structure determination, as well as organic synthesis. I have successfully worked with a large range of professionals from programmers to accountants, chemical engineers to plant geneticists.

Higher education learning and teaching for STEM students. Especially using industry/workplace contexts for learning and career readiness. This includes cultural intellengence as a transferrable skill. Including;

Career development learning
Due to the generic nature of the Science degree in many parts of the world, science students are not directly linked into their profession while studying (unlike courses like teaching and health). This can result in a poor understanding of workplaces which can be challenging for institutions to address. Afterall which workplaces do the students need to learn about? Where will the students end up? Placements can make a huge difference but issues of scale and equity (if placements are unpaid) mean that other complementary approaches are needed. In-curricular career development learning which is contextualised for science students is one option. We are looking at the impact of a unit which was designed specifically to fill known gaps in student knowledge. WE are looking at self-perceived changes across the unit and measurable differences to the Graduate Outcome Survery for those same students one and three years post-graduation.

Industry-linked context-based learning for career belonging
Using context-based learning and authentic assessment in science can increase engagement in the classroom and helps with aspects of employability especially if educators are concious of embedding and communicating the importance of transferrable skills. We are talking this work one step further and looking at the impact of this environment on student belonging and the link between employability and belonging in this undergraduate context in Australia.

Tolerance of Ambiguity
One very important facet of learning and teaching is the extent to which their students will tolerate uncertainty. The ability to tolerate uncertainty as a personality variable was first identified by Budner (1962) who described an individual’s tendency to see ambiguous or uncertain situations as either desirable or as a threat. Further to this, uncertainty tolerance (UT) is a psychological construct referring to the way an individual(s) perceive(s) and process(es) information about ambiguous situations or stimuli when confronted by an array of unfamiliar, complex, or incongruent clues. Tolerance of uncertainty is now recognised as being an important determinant of an individual’s ability to function successfully in both the class room and the workplace. We are looking at how high achieving educators manage ambiguity in the classroom and what we can learnfrom them about helping students see ambiguity as part of the way systems work as opposed to a negative.

Indigenous cultural competency before and after studying an introduction to Indigenous Science.
We look at the impact of studying a semester long unit on the Indigenous cultural competency of science students in an for-credit eective. Using Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews Indigenous Graduate Attribute evaluation instrument we are looking at students perceptions and beliefs before and after the unit to determine, first where these students start, and then what the impact of the learning is. This work is incredibly important as poor attempts to introduce Indigenous perpectives and content, can lead to the use of sterotypes by educators and actually decrease cultural competency.

Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Education Committee member since 2020.

Career learning for Science students

Work Integrated Learning

Chemistry

SLE155

Work Integrated learning, Context-based learning, Career development learning, Laboratory learning, WIL in the laboratory classroom, Embedding Indigenous perspectives in Science curricular, Biomass utilissation, Biomass for biofuels, Biomass characterisation

The Australian Council of the Deans of Science - Indigenous Science for tertiary educators website creator and manager. 

The Australian Council of the Environmental Deans and Directors EnviroCare lead

Community of Practice lead - Support for HE educators to introduce Indigneous Science into their units.

Indigenous wisdom and knowledge leading in the way in new Monash University Science course. 

Associate Professor Bud Talbot University of Colorado, Denver

Associate Professor Michelle Lazarus Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Dr Matt Pye University of Sydney, Australia

Dr Stephen George-Williams University of Sydney, Australia

RACI citation - 2023

Higher Education Academy Senior Fellowship - 2022

Science Faculty Innovation in Teaching Award Commendation – Building an Indigenous Science unit - 2021

Science Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award - 2020

Vice-Chancellor’s nomination for Excellence in teaching - 2020

VESKI Leading the Way leadership program scholarship - 2018

Team of the Year (DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory) - 2013

Business Excellence Award - Team (CSIRO) - 2003

I'm excited to soon be releaseing my book "Building your Career in STEM" through the Royal Society of Chemistry (anticipated release July, 2024). Thank you to all the contributors and Dr Rebecca Yee as Co-editor.