About Me

Hello world! My name is Faith Frings, and I am discipline-based education researcher (DBER) interested in student motivation and cognition in statistics and data science in the life sciences. I am currently a PhD candidate in the Biology Education Research Group (BERG) at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), advised by Dr. Melissa Aikens.

I earned a M.S. in Biology with a concentration in Ecology and Evolution at the University of South Florida under the Biology Education Lab at USF. My thesis research used mixed methods to investigate how undergraduate students interpret different styles of phylogenetic trees in upper level biology courses.

My current dissertation research uses qualitative and quantitative methods to explore and investigate undergraduate student motivation to engage with learning coding and statistics in the life sciences. I collect data in R integrated biology courses, and in field-based data science courses.

I am currently serving as the Chair of the DBER scholars in training (DBER-SiT) committee . Our goals are to provide community and support for DBER graduate and postdoctoral scholars. More information here. If you are interested in joining the DBER-SiT Discord, please email us!

I also co-lead an R Users Group with Dr. Easton White at UNH. Our goals are to develop a community for graduate students and post docs to learn and do statistics and coding in R. More information here!