Lisa Elfring
Dr. Lisa K. Elfring serves as Vice Provost, Assessment, Teaching and Technology at the University of Arizona, where she leads the University Center for Assessment, Teaching, and Technology (UCATT). UCATT supports teaching across all University of Arizona campuses and modalities. She is the institutional lead for the University’s Center for the Integration of Teaching, Research, and Learning (CIRTL) and her portfolio includes the Center for University Education Scholarship (CUES) and the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program. She also serves as the University’s Accreditation Liaison officer.
In her current role, Dr. Elfring has spearheaded several transformative teaching initiatives. She co-led the merger of two teaching-support units to form UCATT, creating a unified approach to teaching support. She collaborated in developing a course-outcomes dashboard that provides instructors with disaggregated data on student success and retention, enabling evidence-based approaches to reducing equity gaps. Additionally, she has led institutional reforms to student course evaluations, implementing research-informed changes that significantly decreased biased responses, promoting effective use of feedback to help instructors improve their teaching.
Dr. Elfring is a national leader in STEM education reform. She serves as a PULSE (Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education) Fellow, working to transform undergraduate life science education nationwide. Her research contributions include peer-reviewed publications on evidence-based instructional practices, student assessment, and instructional-team models in large STEM courses. She has collaborated to secure over $6 million in grant funding from organizations including NSF, NIH, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, supporting projects that develop innovative curricula, promote quantitative literacy in introductory biology courses, and promote the use of learning assistants to increase evidence-based teaching practices.
Dr. Elfring's excellence in education has been recognized through numerous awards, including the 2024 Henry and Phyllis Koffler Prize for outstanding accomplishments in teaching—the University of Arizona's highest teaching honor. She was named a 2024 University of Arizona Woman of Impact. Dr. Elfring has also received the University of Arizona Honors College Excellence in Teaching Award, the College of Science Galileo Circle Copernicus Award, and was selected as a University of Arizona Faculty Fellow. Her work was further recognized through her selection as a National Academies Education Fellow in the Life Sciences and a AAAS/American Physiological Society BioScience Ed Net Fellow.
Dr. Elfring holds a PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and a BA in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and completed postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her training in molecular genetics and cell and developmental biology continue to inform and enrich her research and teaching.