Shannan Maisey, Academic Mentor, UNSW Science

Dr Shannan Maisey began her teaching career in chemistry labs while doing honours at the University of Western Australia (UWA). During her PhD in atmospheric chemistry, she undertook a tertiary teaching internship and from her very first lecture she was hooked. During her internship she undertook her first curriculum development project, which was a total restructure of the assessment of second year labs. Dr Maisey discovered that she enjoyed changing the way chemistry is taught so that students get excited and fascinated by the science and see value in lessons and assessments.  

After finishing her PhD, Dr Maisey was employed as a postdoc with a teaching bent. In this role she was given the freedom to digitise all of the laboratory reports and re-write the labs in core chemistry unit to create cap-stoning tasks which encouraged our third year students to think and behave like chemists and this is a research theme that continue to explore. She was subsequently employed as a teaching only academic, still at UWA, and tasked with completing the transformation and coordination of the aforementioned labs as well as lecturing in first- and third-year chemistry courses. One of the labs that she created was used as an exemplar assessment by the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) of several the threshold learning outcome (TLOs) which are used for accreditation of Chemistry degree programs in Australia. In this role she was also awarded an internal teaching grant for the development of skills in first year laboratories. This work earned her and her team a university teaching award.  

Dr Maisey came to UNSW at the beginning of 2017 as a lecturer. Since then she has been lecturing first and third year classes, coordinating a third year unit and working on several curriculum development projects including a total transformation of first year chemistry (for which her team were awarded a UNSW SEIF grant), the redesign of our third year analytical chemistry course to include the development of key graduate attributes and many more exciting projects.

Email [email protected] to enquire if Shannan is available to mentor you.