Mary Poffenroth

During her nearly nine years of teaching biology at San Jose State University, she has made innovation in science education and communication a priority. Partnering with Wiley & Sons, she created original visual and written media to engage the non-scientist with the iWonder Biology series. She went on to serve as executive producer and host for the short film Coyote Valley: Connecting People, Connecting Wildlife, which received two honorable mention awards at the International Wildlife Film Festival. Mary specializes in large lecture formats (125 to 400 students), reaching 2,000 students every year. Leveraging her enormous class population, Mary created an outdoor, environmental student volunteer program in 2009. To date, nearly 4,000 students have volunteered over 15,000 work hours to local, environmental non-profit organizations. Mary loves getting people excited about science using visual media and has reached tens of thousands of viewers across the world with her Mahalo.com science videos. In addition to Wiley & Sons, she has written for Science and published her first solo title with Cognella Publishing in 2015, “Write, Present, Create: Science Communication for Undergraduates”.