Affiliation: U.S. Air Force Academy
Education: Ph.D. Colorado State University; M.A. University of Northern Colorado; B.A Fairfield University
Research and Professional Experience: Michelle A. Butler Samuels, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology and a faculty member in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) where she has served since 1999. She is an experimental psychologist with an emphasis in behavioral neuroscience (graduated 1997-Colorado State University) and has been conducting inclusion research since 2008. She has developed high-impact, academic, research and service collaborations with community partners including the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind, Craig Hospital for Brain/Spinal Cord Rehabilitation, and most recently Naropa University, a Buddhist-inspired university. Her research focuses on resilience, employability, and inclusion/respect for individuals with disabilities and the value of face-to-face experiences with different types of others to build understanding and inclusivity. For the past two years, she directed the core class, Introduction to Behavioral Sciences for more than 1,000 first-year cadets and has mentored its 12 instructor team. At USAFA, she served as a cross-organizational committee member for the Development and Assessment of Ethics and Respect for Human Dignity. Appointed by the Governor of Colorado, she is serving her second, four-year term as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind. In other external service, she served as Treasurer and President of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, a regional division of the American Psychological Association. In addition to her current position at USAFA, she is serving as a Visiting Scholar at Naropa University.
Lauren Scharff is the Director for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Program and Professor of Behavioral Sciences at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where she has worked since 2008. Prior to that, she was a professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Stephen F. Austin State University where she worked beginning in 1993. She completed her Ph.D. in Human Experimental Psychology in December 1992 from the University of Texas at Austin. Courses she has taught include introductory psychology, leadership, research methods, biopsychology, and perception, and she has won several teaching awards. Her current research focuses on a variety of topics within SoTL (e.g. metacognition, use of knowledge surveys, critical thinking), although she sometimes still collaborates on research projects in the human factors or visual perception areas. Dr. Scharff is a past president of the Southwestern Psychological Association (2009) and past the United States Regional Vice President for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2016-2019). She is co-creator of the award-winning Improve with Metacognition website.