Patrice Ludwig, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Biology and Core JMU XLabs Faculty, James Madison University

Dr. Ludwig is passionate about using evidence-based practices to ensure that the humans responsible for our future are prepared for the challenge. Her doctoral training as a population ecologist at the University of Virginia primed her thinking about how important relationships are for learning. Today, her research focuses on understanding how students and instructors form and leverage learning partnerships in transdisciplinary courses. She has honed her curriculum design skills through years of professional development and practice redesigning the first-year biology curriculum at JMU. In JMU XLabs, she has co-developed and co-instructed multiple transdisciplinary classes that address problems so complex that they must be approached at the systems level from multiple perspectives. She finds great joy in co-designing and conducting collaborative research on these experiences to generate evidence of their outcomes from both the student and faculty perspectives.