This month, we're featuring members of our SABER Scholars-in-Training community who were acknowledged for their talks or posters at our annual national meeting in July.

Our second "Human of DBER" for September is Ray Potter, a PhD Student at the University of Washington and 2026 recipient of the Bill Wood Graduate Talk Award. 

The way I found DBER was because as an undergraduate I got the opportunity to be a teaching assistant, and I kept noticing while some students really thrived, others were struggling, and I wanted to think about how to create an environment where everyone could succeed. When I entered my masters in ecology and evolutionary biology program, there was a fantastic TA training program. The instructor Katie Dixie had a profound impact on me. She emphasized iterative improvement– start with what you think you can do better, try it out, and then continue to modify and adjust. I continued my education research journey with the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), a national organization with a program at UCLA led by Katie and K. Supriya. I ended up doing a project on implementing problem solving sessions in addition to office hours in a calculus for life scientists course. Many students had told me they wanted to come to office hours but felt intimidated, so I thought that scaffolding and adding structure with worksheets would help students. The survey results indicated students really enjoyed these sessions, and they helped improve grades. After completing this project, there was funding to present at SABER West. That conference was a very eye opening experience, where for the first time I fully realized how many DBER career paths there were.

In my PhD with Dr. Elli Theobald at University of Washington, I’ve examined features of STEM classrooms that make them feel welcoming or exclusionary. I started noticing a lot of parallels between ecology and education research. For example, just as students exist within classrooms within a broader society, organisms exist in populations that exist in larger ecosystems. Why some individuals thrive and others struggle is due to a complex interaction between multiple levels of the environment. One of my favorite parts about DBER and SABER is people come in with so many different disciplinary backgrounds, and that shapes the research questions and methods they use. Bringing your unique background also includes your identities and how you navigate the world. As someone who is neurodivergent, gender queer, and disabled, this shaped my experiences with higher education, and the research questions and interests I now have in DBER. Science is often portrayed as “objective,” while identity absolutely impacts any research. In DBER, not only is this recognized, but it’s encouraged to use your personal experiences to shape your research questions, and I really like getting to bring my whole self into this work. Advice I would give to anyone wanting to go into DBER is to use your unique background to help shape your research, and also talk to and collaborate with people with different backgrounds and perspectives.

If you have a colleague in DBER that you'd like to nominate to be the next Human of DBER, please submit your nomination here! Nominations are welcome for members of the SABER and biology education research community, including undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, staff, educators, and community partners who contribute to biology education, research, or inclusive STEM initiatives.