Director, Tennessee STEM Education Center (TSEC)


Director, TSEC

Gregory Rushton
office:  Room 102 Fairview Building  

                   Gregory Rushton     

phone:   615-494-8738
fax:  615-413-5042
mail: 

MTSU Box 82
Murfreesboro, TN 37132

Responsibilities

The TN STEM Education Center (TSEC) Director leads the university’s efforts to improve STEM education at all educational levels and seeks to partner with internal and external stakeholders to achieve a position of local and national prominence.

The Tennessee Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education Center (TSEC) is a research and outreach arm of MTSU, aimed at improving K-20 STEM education both locally and nationally.  TSEC partners with internal and external stakeholders to identify and address critical issues that impact access, equity, innovation, and leadership through collaborative activities, sponsored projects, and dissemination products at professional meetings and in practitioner and research journals. TSEC currently sponsors several high-profile annual events including the STEM Education Research Conference, the STEM Expo, and Posters at the Capitol, and invites the MTSU community to fulfill and refine the TSEC mission and vision through its involvement in existing programming or by initiating a conversation with us about how to better serve our constituencies.  

Professional Background

Greg Rushton comes to MTSU from SUNY Stony Brook, where he was an Associate Professor of Chemistry and an Associate Director of Science Education in the Institute for STEM Education (I-STEM). Dr. Rushton also held a faculty position for over a decade at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, where he directed a graduate program in science education and taught in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

His research areas include conceptual change in tertiary chemistry learning environments, science classroom discourse practices; policy reform in K-16 chemistry education; large-scale demographic analyses of K-12 STEM teaching populations, and science teacher leadership.  Rushton has directed or co-directed more than twenty externally funded projects totaling nearly $17M since 2005, including awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

He regularly shares his work at national and international meetings, and has authored or co-authored more than 40 refereed research manuscripts and book chapters in venues that reach diverse audiences such as Educational Researcher, Science Education, ACS Central Science, and the Journal of Chemical Education.  Rushton earned a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry and a M.Ed. in science education at the University of South Carolina, and an undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Southern California.

Personal Information

Greg moves to Murfreesboro with his wife, Tricia, and his children, Isabella and Ethan.