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Jessica Marie Deshler

  • Ethnicity: Hispanic
  • Gender: F
  • Year of Birth: 
  • Place of Birth: Wichita Falls, Texas

320 Armstrong Hall, PO Box 6310
Department of Mathematics
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV, 26505
Fax: 304-293-3982
Office: 304-293-8939

Education: 

  • PhD Institution: University of New Mexico, 2008
  • MS Institution: University of New Mexico, 2001
  • BS Institution: New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, 1999 

Biography:

Jessica Deshler was born in Texas and grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Deshler was always interested in mathematics and had decided early in high school to attend New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology for her undergraduate degree in Mathematics.  (She was the first female from her high school to take earn a perfect score of 5 on the Calculus AB Exam) While there she took an applied path and studied systems of ordinary and partial differential equations. 

She attended UNM for graduate school, completing her Master’s degree and PhD coursework in applied mathematics and studied fluid dynamics. She spent one summer at Sandia National Laboratories running numerical simulations of fluids experiments she and colleagues conducted in the UNM Mechanical Engineering fluid dynamics laboratory. 

She taught her first recitation as an undergraduate student and fell in love with teaching. While a graduate student she was a TA for several courses and became more interested in the teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics.  During her doctorate, she changed her focus from applied mathematics to mathematics education and completed a dissertation studying teaching practices and classroom interactions in the undergraduate classroom. She was a National Science Foundation New Mexico Alliance for Graduate Education and Professoriate (NM-AGEP) Fellow from 2001-2004. 

Her current research focuses on the professional development of mathematics graduate teaching assistants, issues of gender equity in the mathematics classroom and the profession, and course and programmatic evaluation. She was a US Fulbright Scholar in 2015-2016 working with mathematics graduate students in Budapest, Hungary at Central European University. She is a MAA Project NExT Red ‘08 Fellow.