Speaker Introduction

Dee U. Silverthorn, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in Marine Science from the Belle W. Baruch Institute at the University of South Carolina, and took her first faculty appointment in the Physiology Department at the Medical University of South Carolina while her husband was in medical school. After a three years at the University of Texas Medical Branch - Galveston, she accepted a position at UT-Austin in 1986.

Dee is the coordinator for the undergraduate physiology curriculum at UT. She teaches both lecture and laboratory courses, and she uses an interactive teaching method with her large classes. Her educational research interest is techniques for teaching and assessing conceptual understanding, as well as the adaptation process that students and faculty go through when first introduced to active learning. She has been the principal investigator on several education grants from the National Science Foundation. Her teaching awards and honors include the American Physiological Society 9th Arthur C. Guyton Physiology Educator of the Year, UT Marilla D. Svinicki Burnt Orange Apple Award, the

American Physiological Society Claude Bernard Distinguished Lecturer, and the Texas Excellence Teaching Award. Her undergraduate physiology textbook, now in its fourth edition, has won the Text and Academic Authors Association Textbook Excellence Award and the UT Robert W. Hamilton Author Award.