Tamara Brenner
President

As President of NIST, Tamara Brenner is committed to advancing NIST’s mission of inspiring and empowering transformation of STEM education. She attended her first Summer Institute in Madison in 2010, and then served as a facilitator, organizer, and co-director of the Northeast Regional Summer Institute between 2011 and 2019. In 2021 and 2022, she co-led a NIST working group that organized Solve My Problem (now called Addressing Challenges in Teaching), which creates supportive learning communities to explore teaching challenges and develop solutions. Her career trajectory from teaching undergraduate biology to supporting educational development for faculty and graduate students was strongly influenced by her involvement with the Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching. Most recently, she served as the executive director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University.
Tamara earned her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of California, San Francisco, and her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Swarthmore College. She enjoys spending time outdoors, hiking, painting, and drawing.