For Faculty Only

Keynote address by Dr. Mays Imad

How will we welcome students and colleagues to our institutions and classrooms in fall 2022 and beyond? What can we as educators do to help attend to their mental health and ameliorate their ongoing exhaustion and distress, while at the same time, intentionally engaging in self-care?   We’ll consider the power of knowledge; how understanding the neuroscience of toxic stress empowers us to self-regulate and help our students cope, engage, connect, and learn. We will examine the principles and practical examples of equity-centered trauma-informed approaches and reflect on the connections between trauma-informed education, healing, and restorative justice.   Participants will walk away with concrete strategies they can use in their own courses and contexts to help their students’ learning and success.  

Mays Imad is a Gardner Institute Fellow and AAC&U Senior Fellow within the Office of Undergraduate STEM Education. Her research focuses on stress, self-awareness, advocacy, and classroom community, and how these impact student learning and success. As an undergraduate, Mays studied philosophy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and later earned a Ph.D. in Cellular & Clinical Neurobiology from Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. She completed a National Institute of Health-Funded postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Arizona’s Department of Neuroscience. Mays joined the department of Life and Physical Sciences at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona in 2009. During her tenure at Pima, she taught Physiology, Pathophysiology, Genetics, Biotechnology, and Biomedical Ethics. She also founded Pima’s Teaching and Learning Center (TLC). Mays is currently teaching in the biology department at Connecticut College.  

A nationally recognized expert on trauma-informed teaching and learning, she advocates for institutions to make mental health a top priority and to systematically support the education of the whole student. Mays has also received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her work on critical thinking in STEM courses.