Team

Assistant Provost of Faculty and Academic Staff Development 
Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education

Biography

Marilyn Amey is a professor of higher, adult and lifelong education. She serves as assistant provost for Faculty and Academic Staff Development. In that role, she facilitates the work of the Office for Faculty and Academic Staff Development (OFASD), which cultivates connections and integrated work with partners across campus to support the professional growth of MSU colleagues across the full range of academic responsibilities and throughout their careers.

Dr. Amey studies educational partnerships, particularly those of community colleges; leadership, including how leaders learn; postsecondary governance and administration; and faculty concerns, including interdisciplinary academic work. Her current work focuses on education partnerships, including a multi-year evaluation of institutions in an interdisciplinary consortium and mid-level academic and administrative leadership. Her areas of expertise are student affairs administration and higher, adult and lifelong education. Amey was appointed as the Dr. Mildred B. Erickson Distinguished Chair in Higher, Adult and Lifelong Education in 2017. She received her doctorate from Pennsylvania State University.

Post Doc Researcher

Email: berling1@msu.edu

Biography

Eric Berling earned his PhD in Philosophy, and his primary philosophical interests focus on the philosophy of science (especially evolutionary biology), with an emphasis on the nature of scientific explanation and the responsible conduct of research.  He is a currently a post doc researcher on the Active LENS and VERITIES Initiative projects and the STEAM Educator at the East Lansing Public Library.  

Graduate Student

Email: brandin2@msu.edu

Biography

Jonah Branding is a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy and the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior program.   His primary philosophical interests focus on the philosophy of science, especially as it relates to evolution and the environment. 

Post Doc Researcher

Email: ike@msu.edu

Biography

Ike Iyioke holds a PhD in Philosophy with a multidisciplinary background international relations, journalism and teaching. In his philosophical studies Iyioke explores questions pertaining to moral philosophy, particularly bioethics. He is also interested in environmental ethics, environmental science public policy, and the role these play in moral thinking.

Interim Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Professor of Economics

Biography

Thomas D. Jeitschko serves as the Interim Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Michigan State University. He transitioned into this role from serving as the Senior Associate Provost, overseeing the budgeting process of the Office of the Provost, provost’s office communications and events, Institutional Research, and Institutional Space Planning and Management, as well as the Apple Developer Academy with MSU in Detroit and the Student Information System transition project. Previous to that he was MSU’s Associate Provost for Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and Dean of the Graduate School, after serving for several years as the Director of the American Economic Association Summer Program—a two-month, intensive pre-doctoral residential program that prepares talented undergraduate students from under-represented backgrounds for graduate work in economics and related fields..

Jeitschko is a Professor of Economics who holds an advanced degree from the University of Münster in Germany in Economic History and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in Mathematical Economics. At MSU he has taught graduate courses and served on PhD committees in the College of Social Science, the Business College, the Law College, the College of Engineering, and the College of Ag and Natural Resources. He has published in a wide variety of journals and served on multiple editorial boards. Prior to his current appointment at MSU, he has held faculty positions at Royal Holloway College, University of London and Texas A&M University, as well as shorter appointments at Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown Universities, and Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany; and he has also worked at the U.S. Department of Justice and has advised States Attorneys General throughout the U.S.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Biography

Chet McLeskey holds a PhD in Philosophy that is grounded in ethics, broadly construed, and focuses on bioethics, virtue theory, and the epistemic and psychological aspects of ethical decision making. His current research involves the notion of moral expertise in bioethics and how best to form ethical decision making bodies, such as ethics committees. Chet also works on the Scientific Virtues Project developed by Prof. Robert T. Pennock, and has published and presented work on the role of virtue and character in scientific practice. Within C4I, Chet is developing Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training workshops that build on work from the Scientific Virtues Project. Using the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative’s model, the workshops explore the notion of scholarly virtue in humanities and arts disciplines and how developing a character and culture that promotes and instills these virtues aids in achieving excellence inscholarship and teaching.

Executive Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative Center
Professor of Philosophy and Faculty in AgBio Research and Enviornmental Science & Policy

Biography

Michael O’Rourke is Professor of Philosophy and faculty in AgBioResearch and Environmental Science & Policy at Michigan State University. He is Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, an NSF-sponsored research consortium that investigates philosophical approaches to facilitating interdisciplinary research (http://tdi.msu.edu/), Executive Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative Center, a new service center at MSU that is the principal locus of Toolbox work, and former Director of the MSU Center for Interdisciplinarity. His research interests include interdisciplinary theory, epistemology, communication and epistemic integration in collaborative, cross-disciplinary research, and linguistic communication between intelligent agents.

University Distinguished Professor
VERITIES Initiative Principal Investigator

Email: pennock5@msu.edu

Biography

Robert T. Pennock is University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University with appointments in its Lyman Briggs College and the departments of Philosophy and Computer Science & Engineering.  His research involves empirical and philosophical questions that relate to evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and the scientific character. He uses this to help improve public understanding of science, to defend evolution education in the public schools, and to advance responsible conduct of research curricula nationally.  He directs the Vocational Virtues Project, which develops a virtue-based approach to understanding integrity and responsible conduct, and he is PI of the NSF-funded VERITIES initiative, which aims to demonstrate how to implement this approach to RCR training at scale.  He is also PI of the largest national study of the scientific ethical mindset, investigating scientists’ views of values in science and how these are learned and passed on.  He is President-Elect of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, where he leads several professional ethics initiatives.  Pennock is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a National Associate of the National Academies of Science.  His BEACON NSF Science & Technology Center recently received MSU’s Excellence in Diversity Award. A lifetime member of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, Pennock has published numerous articles on science ethics and his book on science and virtue—An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Structure of Science—was published in 2019 by MIT Press.

Graduate Research Assistant

Biography

Jesenia Rosales is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education (HALE) at Michigan State University. She is the assistant editor for the Community College Review Journal. Her research focuses on the professoriate, critical whiteness studies, colorism in Latina/o/x, and race and equity in higher education.