Tara M. King, Ed.D., is a Senior Project Director in the Inclusive STEMM Ecosystems for Equity & Diversity (ISEED) unit at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). At AAAS she serves as Center Coordinator of the NSF-funded S-STEM Resource and Evaluation Center (S-STEM REC).
Tara has over ten years of experience managing educational transformation and student success projects in higher education. At the Association of American Universities (AAU), Tara helped to develop and execute multiple grant-funded systemic change efforts that engaged member campuses and other national stakeholders in AAU’s Undergraduate STEM and PhD Education Initiatives. During her time at the University of Delaware, Tara coordinated and expanded several college- and institution-wide student success efforts for undergraduate and graduate students across all disciplines. Furthermore, at the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, Inc. (NACME), Tara advanced a national roundtable to strengthen pathways for community college students to enter engineering careers.
In addition to project management, Tara’s career has included teaching education courses at the college level, and physics and mathematics courses at the high school level. She also helped to develop an outreach project at Brookhaven National Laboratory involving high school teachers and students in high-energy cosmic ray research. Moreover, Tara has produced scholarship in the areas of college student persistence, STEM teaching and learning, and institutional change.
A Pell Grant recipient and first-generation college graduate, Tara earned her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and M.A. in Education degrees from the University of Delaware; and her M.A.T. and B.S. degrees in Physics from Stony Brook University.
