Lecturer in Biology, Faculty Lead of the Commonwealth Arboretum, Penn State Schuylkill

Mary Ann V. Smith, MA, MA, MBA is a faculty member in Chemistry and Biology at Penn State Schuylkill. Her work, like her education, spans multiple disciplines and tracks. She received a B.S. in Environmental Science in 2007 and M.A in Chemistry with a thesis option in 2009 from the University of Scranton, Scranton, PA. Her education at the University of Scranton promoted the idea that interdisciplinary work could help improve the environment, but she also realized that additional work in the humanities could help her communicate those related connections better. With this perspective, she completed a B.A. in Philosophy in 2011 and a M.A. in Religious Studies in 2018 from the University of Scranton. She later completed a M.B.A. in Management with a course focus on sustainable business from Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 2020. She has worked in education with a significant focus on Sustainability and Green Chemistry since 2007. Upon coming to Penn State Schuylkill in fall 2019, she began implementing sustainability into all her courses. She works on Environmental connections to medicine and alternatives in many aspects through her work in Sourdough microbiomes and especially antibiotic discovery within soils. Within the associated Microbiology courses she teaches, the antibiotic discovery course also incorporates storytelling to emphasize the importance of communicating difficult information to an untrained population. This work was highlighted in her 2021 publication “Fighting for the CURE: Antibiotic Discovery and Storytelling during the Time of COVID” in the Journal of Transformative Education. She also works to track Climate Change and monitoring with the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program (student 1997, instructor 2020), an international partnership to help increase students’ participation in environmental work. Understanding the collaborative nature of education, she also participates with the Science Education Alliance – Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics Education (SEA-PHAGES) program (2016), Small World Initiative (2017), Tiny Earth Program (2018), and Genomics Education Partnership (2021). Her work has provided opportunities to examine Sustainable Agriculture and Gardening, which aids in her work with the Community Garden at the Penn State Schuylkill campus and the Penn State Schuylkill Seed Bank Library. As an extension of such work, she worked to develop the Penn State Schuylkill Arboretum, which has received accreditation from ArbNet, an international community of arboreta. The arboretum now offers programming for the Schuylkill County community on the importance of trees and brings that story to new classes of students each year through her curriculum at Penn State Schuylkill. With the development and launch of the Penn State Commonwealth Arboretum Network (CAN), Smith and her CAN colleagues have opened new opportunities for expanding the tree community network to expand engagement in collaborative research and teaching.