Kate Miller '08

The Princeton Teacher Prep Program was a lifeline for me as a new graduate during the 2008 recession. It gave me the skills I needed to begin a career in education, but it also sent me down a path that would become much more than a job, but a big piece of my identity and a lifelong passion for making science and statistics more accessible and engaging for students of all ages. Data is everywhere. We are all immersed in it constantly. Providing students with the skills, but also the awareness to turn that to their advantage as active rather than passive producers and consumers of data is a goal that I will be working towards for the foreseeable future.
Mentored
Matt DiDonato '12

Kate is currently a Research Associate for Data Science Education at the Concord Consortium, a small research and design non-profit which focuses on data science education and digital literacy. She currently works on several grant-funded projects which seek to increase access to data science education and data literacy for students and teachers across K-12 classrooms and settings. She is also involved in building a community of researchers focused on data science education at the K-12 level in partnership with Data Science 4 Everyone.

Kate’s journey in the field of education has included several settings and experiences. She completed her TPP certificate as a continuing education student, returning to Princeton nearly a year after initially graduating with a degree in Astrophysics. After graduating from TPP in 2010, Kate spent four years as a public high school physics teacher at The Brooklyn Latin School. She joined the staff in the school’s fifth year of existence as the first female science teacher and helped grow the school and the science department, serving as department chair in her final year there. While teaching full time, Kate also completed her master’s degree in science education at Teachers College.

Kate then moved into the informal education space as the Senior Manager for Curriculum and Teaching at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In her three years there, she helped develop a full-time core teaching staff for the Youth Initiatives Department as well as developing and teaching curriculum for many programs at the middle school and high school level. She also taught pre-service teachers in their informal education summer residency and realized she really loved working with teachers and helping them grow and expand their access to resources.

This led Kate to a PhD program at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania where she spent five years developing, implementing, and researching teacher professional development programs for science teachers across age and subject focus. Her dissertation explored the concept of teacher knowledge for data literacy as the first steps toward developing more comprehensive support for teachers to increase their data literacy engagements in their classrooms.

Class Year
2008