The 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey Released October 17, 2001
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NAGPS Survey Team Biographies

Malaina Brown is a Graduate Career Counselor at the University of Chicago Career and Placement Services. She has completed graduate training in paleoethnobotany at Washington University in St. Louis. Ms. Brown's nonprofit experience includes serving as Employment Concerns Coordinator for the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students, in addition to working in student services administration at Columbia University. Brown taught anthropology courses at Washington University and she was also active in developing career services programming for graduate students there. Prior to her graduate work, Brown coordinated volunteer programs at a sexual assault prevention and awareness center. She earned a B.A. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan.

Geoff Davis is a software consultant in San Francisco who has a longstanding interest in science education. Davis is the creator of PhDs.org, a popular online resource for science and engineering graduate students. In 1999 he and Peter Fiske created the PhDs.org Grad School Survey in which 6,500 science and engineering students and recent Ph.D.s assessed their doctoral programs' educational practices. This project later evolved into the current NAGPS survey. From 1998-2000 Davis was a researcher at Microsoft Research, where his research focused on technologies related to the Windows Media player, and a software engineer in Microsoft's product division. Davis was an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department at Dartmouth College from 1996-8 and was a J.W. Young Research Instructor in the same department from 1994-6. Davis earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from New York University's Courant Institute in 1994. Davis was the recipient of the 2000 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Award, an award presented to the author of best paper in an IEEE journal by an author under 30. See http://www.geoffdavis.net for further information.

Adam P. Fagen is a doctoral student at Harvard University, pursuing a Ph.D. in an ad hoc program in Molecular Biology and Education. A graduate of Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Biology and Mathematics, he earned an A.M. in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard before deciding to focus on science education for his doctorate. Adam is interested in developing materials and resources to facilitate a more conceptual approach to introductory college-level biology instruction and in emphasizing the importance of a research-based approach to education. He has been involved with the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) for several years; in addition to serving as co-chair of The National Doctoral Program Survey, he was chair of the ad hoc Committee on Faculty-Students Relations.

Susan Niebur was co-chair of the NAGPS National Doctoral Program Survey Committee and a recent physics Ph.D. recipient from Washington University in St. Louis. She has been involved with the project from its inception, focusing on institution and association relations, publicity, survey design and coordination of the survey advisory board. Susan now works in science policy at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Kimberly Suedkamp Wells is the Immediate Past President of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) and co-chair of The National Doctoral Program Survey, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Kim became involved with the survey after her election in October of 2000 and has been responsible for financial and legal oversight, foundations relations, and advisory committee relations. Kim is currently a doctoral student in Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia studying grassland birds. Her research interests include teaching in natural resources, ecological modeling, and population dynamics of grassland birds. Kim has been involved in graduate student governance and advocacy since she first became a graduate student. While serving as the President of the Graduate and Professional Student Association at Oklahoma State, Kim was responsible for negotiating subsidized health care benefits for graduate students and was part of a team that created and implemented the first on-line survey of graduate student satisfaction on her campus. During her term as President of NAGPS, Kim has been involved in several issues related to graduate education and advocacy at the national level. Kim has been an invited speaker and panelist on issues relating to the role of the Graduate Dean in Graduate Student Organizations, causes of the unionization movement, and health-related behaviors of graduate students for the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).