Dr. Patrick/Patricia Killion is the Director of The Office of Undergraduate Research and the Director of The First-Year Innovation & Research Experience in the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost and Assistant Clinical Professor of Cell Biology & Molecular Genetics at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). 

 

They continue to serve as the founding director of FIRE (The First-Year Innovation & Research Experience), initiated in 2014.  FIRE is a university-wide program that annually provides first-year UMD students an inclusive faculty-mentored research experience that drives accelerated professional development supporting young professionals ready to embrace uncertainty and affect equality of opportunity for all.

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Dr. Killion joined the University of Maryland in 2013 after serving as an Assistant Professor of Biology at Delaware Valley University in Pennsylvania where they drove discovery and inquiry-based reform efforts in the first-year Biology curriculum.  Prior to this role, they helped grow the University of Texas Freshman Research Initiative, a model that informed and inspired the UMD FIRE program.  Their research interests and capacities include learning analytics and data science focused on higher education administration, decision-making, and reform. 

 

They are a former Councilor in The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and serves as a consultant to both Rice University and The University of California, Riverside as a part of an NSF-funded four-year effort to rethink and transform the experience of students at these institutions.  Prior to beginning his career in higher education, Dr. Killion was a software engineer with IBM and several technology startups in Austin, Texas.  Dr. Killion has a Ph.D. in Cell & Molecular Biology from the University of Texas and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.