Dr. Stacy Klein-Gardner is as an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Previously, she served as the Director of the Center for STEM Education for Girls at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, TN. There, she lead professional development opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) for K-12 teachers and worked to identify and disseminate best practices from successful K12, university and corporate STEM programs for females. This Center also leads a program for rising 9th through 12th grade girls that integrates community service and engineering design in a global context. An engineer by training and in her ways of thinking, she received a BSE in biomedical and electrical engineering from Duke University in 1991. She then earned her M.S. from Drexel University in 1993 and her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1996.
Dr. Klein-Gardner’s career focuses on K-12 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, particularly as it relates to increasing interest and participation by females.
She continues to serve as an Adjoint Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering and Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt University where she partners with other universities in NSF-funded research to develop the Engineering Design Process Portfolio Scoring Rubric. She ran NSF-funded programs such as Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) for nine years. She served as the Associate Dean for Outreach in the Vanderbilt School of Engineering from 2007-2010. She established the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) engineering pathway from K-12 with Race to the Top funding in 2010-2011 and is working with the state of Tennessee on potential adoption plans for the new Next Generation Science Standards.