Aliya Hashim is a Barrett Honors student majoring in Neuroscience and Pharmacology & Toxicology, with a minor in Philosophy. She has been part of the RISE Center since 2024 and is passionate about making STEM more inclusive and accessible, especially for underrepresented and international students.
Project GenZ is featured in a new Inside Higher Ed article, "In-Person Classes Aren’t Safe From the AI Cheating Boom", examining how generative AI is transforming academic integrity. The piece highlights ASU biology education research showing how everyday participation and assessment practices can be vulnerable to AI misuse, prompting important conversations about how teaching must evolve to meet the realities of Gen Z learning.
A new ASU News article, Project Gen Z asks whether college teaching is working for current students, explores how student driven research is examining whether current teaching practices align with the needs of today’s learners. The article highlights how ASU’s animal physiology course serves as a living laboratory for this work, generating insights to inform more responsive and effective science instruction.
RISE Center Director Sara E. Brownell and PhD student Ben Chan are featured in a new State Press article highlighting Project GenZ, a student led initiative in which undergraduate researchers study how today’s college students learn and engage in science courses to help instructors adapt their teaching practices.
Edwards, B. A., Mitra, C., Bunch, H., Abraham, A. E., Cooper, K. M., & Brownell, S. E. (2026).
RISE researchers have published a new study in Advances in Physiology Education examining whether a pre-med student with bipolar disorder should disclose their diagnosis on a medical school application to explain a period of low academic performance.
Congratulations to first author Baylee Edwards and RISE Ambassadors Hailey Bunch and Corinne Mitra for driving this project forward.
Dr. Danna Staaf is an author, science communicator, and marine biologist. Danna’s dissertation topic was the reproduction and early life of Humboldt squid, or as she likes to summarize it, “squid sex and babies.” Now, she writes popular science books for adults and for children, gives public lectures, and draws funny educational comics. In this video, Danna talks about what she considers a moral failure related to how it felt for her to sacrifice so many squid for her dissertation research.
Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Jr. is the MacKenzie Scott Endowed Professor of Biology at North Carolina A&T State University. He also serves as the Director for the Genomic Research and Data Science Center for Computation and Cloud-Computing (GRADS-4C, the NIH), the Associate Director for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr) (NSF Gen-4 ERC), and the Director of NC Amgen Biotech Experience. Joe’s dissertation research focused on life history, evolution, and aging in Drosophila.