AAP welcomes three new faculty

We are pleased to welcome three new full-time faculty to the UD Associate in Arts Program! Drs. Thomas Giardina, Daniel McDevit, and Alexia Mintos will be joining the AAP beginning in fall 2017.

Tom Giardina, Ph.D., joins the AAP as an assistant professor of biology and will be teaching on the Dover and Georgetown campuses. Giardina was a research and teaching assistant at Binghamton University in New York while earning his B.S. (2008) and Ph.D. (2015) in biological sciences. He worked extensively with the Biology Graduate Student Organization while at Binghamton, serving as the BSGO treasurer in 2011 and its president in 2012. He joined the Binghamton faculty as an adjunct lecturer in 2016 before moving on to a full-time teaching position at the University of Scranton. 

Giardina's scholarly interests include evolution, ecology, and behavior; his research focuses on mating rates and gene expression in the Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly. His work was published in 2011 in the journal Molecular Ecology, and his dissertation, Mating Rate and the Influence of Female Genetics on Remating in Drosophila melanogaster, was completed in 2015. 

 "As an instructor, I believe that one of the most important aspects of a biological education is for students to gain the skills to think as scientists in everyday life," Giardina said. "I strive not only to provide my students with scientific knowledge, but also with the skills to ask questions, weigh evidence, and reach conclusions as scientifically literate citizens." 

Daniel McDevit, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology, also joins the AAP this fall and will be teaching primarily on the Wilmington campus. McDevit earned his B.S. in biology in 2001, graduating with honors from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and received his M.Ed. in secondary science education from Boston College in 2005. He later earned his Ph.D. in biology from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and his doctoral thesis, A Molecular Assisted Survey and Phylogenetic Study of Canadian Brown Macroalgae (Phaeophyceae), was completed in 2010.  McDevit has been teaching biology at SouthWestern State College in Ft. Myers, Fla., since 2011, and serving as interim chair of SouthWestern's science department since 2014. 

McDevit's research interests include the use of DNA barcoding, or DNA-based species identification, and its implications for future biological research; he is particularly interested in DNA barcoding's applications in the study and classification of marine algae. Since 2001, he has authored or co-authored publications appearing in a dozen different scholarly journals and has been invited to present his research at numerous conferences, seminars, and symposia. 

McDevit says he had several influential instructors during the course of his own education who inspired him to pursue teaching. "The main factor that struck me about their teaching was their abundant enthusiasm for their subject," he said. "Their excitement was infectious and made us want to be a part of the excitement. I want to bring this passion to my classroom, to inspire students to be curious, to think critically and to explore the world around them."

Alexia Mintos, Ph.D., will join the AAP as an assistant professor of mathematics. She will be teaching primarily on the Wilmington campus.

Mintos earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of the Virgin Islands in 2007 and also completed a summer internship at Cornell University's Summer Mathematics Institute during her undergraduate education. She attended graduate school at Purdue University, where she earned a master's in mathematics (2010) and a Ph.D. in mathematics education in 2017. Mintos also worked as a research and teaching assistant at both universities while pursuing her degrees.

"My research interests are in teaching and learning mathematics in equitable ways and supporting others in the academy in doing this work," Mintos said. "I am also very passionate about helping underrepresented and first-generation college students transition to university and succeed in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields." 

Mintos's dissertation, Analyzing Tasks to Promote Equity in Secondary Mathematics Teacher Education, was completed in 2017. Her work has been published in The Mathematics Educator, The Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, and Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, in addition to other scholarly journals, and she has presented at numerous educational conferences and research symposia. Mintos is currently working on an ongoing project, begun in 2014, titled "Investigating Oppression in the Mathematics Education Research Community," which is a multi-university, unfunded study designed to examine the experiences of underrepresented groups in mathematics education research.