Center for Teaching and Learning

Dan Perlman is the Interim Faculty Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. He has served in numerous roles at Brandeis, including Associate Provost of Innovation in Education; founding Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning; and Professor of Biology, Environmental Studies, and of The Heller School for Social Policy and Management. He has designed and led numerous pedagogy training programs including a year-long Teaching and Learning Fellows series for Brandeis faculty and multi-day workshops for the NSF Chautauqua program and Brandeis University. He has also led numerous pedagogy workshops at New England colleges and universities.
Perlman has taught numerous courses in ecology, environmental studies, animal behavior, and conservation biology courses, but is especially proud of co-developing and co-teaching two writing-intensive, field-based programs: the year-long Conservation Biology and Biodiversity seminar at Harvard University, which he taught for nine years, and the Brandeis Environmental Field Semester, a five-course integrated semester. He has also worked with thousands of K-12 students in hands-on science workshops. He has received university-wide teaching awards at Brandeis University (the Student Union Teaching Award – twice – and the Louis Dembitz Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching) and at Harvard University (the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching). He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.
Perlman has co-authored three textbooks on conservation biology and ecology: Conserving Earth’s Biodiversity (an interactive CD-ROM created with Edward O. Wilson); Practical Ecology for Planners, Developers, and Citizens (with Jeffrey C. Milder); and Biodiversity:  Exploring Values and Priorities in Conservation (with Glenn Adelson).  In addition, he developed a Website from which he freely distributes teaching materials he has developed for ecology and environmental studies (www.EcoLibrary.org).

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Anahita Zare is the Brandeis MRSEC Director of Education, Outreach, and Diversity where she works to integrate materials science research and education at the K12, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc levels. Anahita supports the Center for Teaching and Learning’s (CTL) with science education and assessment efforts. Anahita has extensive experience in education, both at MIT and the University of Missouri.  Anahita holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Missouri, where her research focused on  emerging techniques for analyzing membrane protein structure in near-native environments which is important for membrane protein related diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.