Programs offered through the public education department are developed and taught by museum education professionals with science backgrounds and years of experience teaching in informal learning environments.

Teresa MacDonald

Teresa MacDonald is Director of Education at the KU Natural History Museum. She holds a Bachelor of Arts, honors, in physical anthropology and a Master of Science in vertebrate paleontology. She has more than twenty years of science teaching experience in museums, science centers, universities and schools from kindergarten to college level on three continents. Teresa is also involved in several National Science Foundation grant-funded projects, including serving as the outreach director for Quarked! Adventures in the Subatomic Universe, a physics education project, and was the Principal Investigator for the Understanding the Tree of Life project.

Selected Papers
MacDonald, T., and Wiley, E.O. (2012). Communicating phylogeny: Evolutionary tree diagrams in museums. Evolution Education and Outreach, 5:14-28. DOI 10.1007/s12052-012-0387-0. (KU ScholarWorks http://hdl.handle.net/1808/9307).

MacDonald, T., and Bean, A. (2011). Adventures in the Subatomic Universe: An exploratory study of a scientist-museum physics education project. Public Understanding of Science, 20(6):846-862.

MacDonald, T. (2010). Communicating Phylogeny: Evolutionary tree diagrams in museums. Paper presented at NARST (National Association for Research in Science Teaching) annual conference, Philadelphia, PA, March.

MacDonald, T., and Bean, A. (2009). Quarked! Adventures in physics education. The Physics Teacher, 47:38-41.

Bekkah Lampe

Bekkah Lampe is the Museum Educator and summer camps lead at the KU Natural History Museum. She holds a Bachelor of Science in biology and a Master of Arts in ecology, evolution and marine biology. She has worked in the education departments of the Carolina Raptor Center in Huntersville, NC, the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore, MD and the Ty Warner Sea Center in Santa Barbara, CA.