Vice Provost for Teaching & Learning

Back towards the end of March, it was announced that Erin Sanders O'Leary would become vice provost for teaching and learning at UCLA. The announcement: [excerpt]

Erin Sanders O’Leary, a UCLA alumna and former UCLA faculty member, has been named UCLA’s inaugural vice provost for teaching and learning. In the newly created role, O’Leary will lead the new UCLA Teaching and Learning Center and drive innovation and collaboration in teaching across the institution. She will begin the new position on Aug. 16.

“Given Professor O’Leary’s UCLA roots, coupled with her administrative experience and compelling vision for inclusive and innovative education, Chancellor Block and I are confident that she will be an extraordinary addition to our campus leadership team,” Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, said in an email to faculty.

Currently, O’Leary is the executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she is also associate professor of biological sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and an associate adjunct professor in microbiology and immunology in the College of Medicine. Prior to joining UIC, O’Leary spent 15 years at UCLA, beginning in 2005 as a lecturer and faculty advisor for training teaching assistants in the department of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics; she later joined the department’s faculty as an associate adjunct professor. She was the founding director of UCLA’s Center for Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences, known as CEILS, and continued to teach classes through Life Sciences Core Education. She also earned her doctorate at UCLA, in biological chemistry...

Full story at https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/erin-sanders-oleary-vice-provost-teaching-learning.

The Bruin is running an interview with Prof. O'Leary: [excerpt]

...Bruin: What projects are you excited about working on at the UCLA Teaching and Learning Center and in your new role as vice provost?

O'Leary: The office itself has three components to it. There’s the campuswide Teaching and Learning Center that supports a lot of the core services that faculty and instructors need to support their teaching. … Then, connected to this, there are these discipline-specific teaching and learning centers scattered around campus. … And CEILS (Center for Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences) that I founded in the science is one example. So those are, in some ways, those same kinds of support and services for faculty, but they’re embedded in the disciplines. … But those (centers) collectively are not reporting to – but are very much interrelated and interfacing very closely with – the campuswide center. The third piece is the pedagogical research area. This is an area I’m particularly interested in because it’s new. … So now, we have an office where you can really bring people together and think about bigger questions impacting teaching and learning. … It creates an opportunity for UCLA to really kind of be this beacon of innovation...

Full interview at https://dailybruin.com/2023/04/19/qa-erin-sanders-oleary-talks-new-role-as-vice-provost-for-teaching-and-learning.