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Usha Sankar, PhD

Associate Teaching Professor of Biology
Department of Biology


Education:

  • PhD, Cell & Molecular Biology, Weil-Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences
  • MS, Biotechnology, Madurai Kamaraj University
  • BS, Botany (Hons), Delhi University

Curriculum Vitae:

Download (PDF)

Research Interests:

  • Human physiology
  • Pedagogical research
  • Air quality and health outcomes

Bio:

Usha Sankar moved to Drexel from Fordham University, where she had been teaching since 2011. At Fordham she was a co-founder of Project FRESH Air, a citizen science research project into air quality in the Bronx, while being a pre-health advisor and teaching human physiology to pre-health students. She was selected for a teaching award by Fordham students. She greatly enjoys connecting with students and teaching Biology majors and pre-health students keeps her energized. There are two topics she is focused on, and those are research into how students learn, and teaching about the correlation between air quality and health outcomes. She published her research on investigations into pedagogical research and her work on bringing air quality research to middle and high school students and undergraduate students. She is always looking for new challenges and designed a course on Climate change and human health. She believes that climate change will impact us all, especially the young people, in many ways, and it is important for the curriculum to reflect that. She joined the Philadelphia Regional Center for Children’s Environmental Health soon after joining Drexel. She intends to continue to teach, do research, and mentor students on air quality and health outcomes while at Drexel.

Selected Publications:

  • "Project FRESH Air: A Community engagement project about health and climate” Holler, S., Sankar U., McNeil, M. Knuts, M., Jack, J. J.Phys.Teach. 2024 https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0136945
  • "Education for Environmental Justice: The Fordham Regional Environmental Sensor for Healthy Air” Holler, S., Sankar U., McNeil, M. Knuts, M., Jack, J. J.Soc.Sci. 2023 https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12120681
  • "Chatbot responses suggest that hypothetical questions are harder than realistic ones” Crowther, G., Sankar, U., Knight, L., Myers, D., Jenkins, L., Knight, T., J. Microbiol & Bio. Educ. https://doi.org10.1128/jmbe.00153-23