Faculty Spotlight

 Dr. Stenger

Cynthia Stenger is a professor of mathematics whose career at UNA spans 2 decades. The focus of her research is K-12 and undergraduate curriculum that cuts across multiple disciplines.

Prior to UNA, she worked as an applied mathematician for two consulting firms in Huntsville. She holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics, psychology, and secondary education, a master’s degree in Mathematics from UA Huntsville, and an interdisciplinary PhD degree in mathematics and undergraduate curriculum from the University of Missouri Kansas City.

During her tenure at UNA, Dr. Stenger co-founded and co-directed summer STEM Camps, the Dual Degree Engineering Program (DDEP) and the Three Minute Thesis Competition (3MT), served six years as chair of mathematics and initiated the MS in mathematics degree program.

The highlights of her career at UNA have been the multi-disciplinary work on the NSF STEM+C CPR2 Grant and bioinformatics research with HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (HA) and the Prokop Lab (MSU).

The Collaborative Partnership to teach math Reasoning through Computer Programming (CPR2) has allowed her to develop curriculum with and offer professional learning to over 200 regional and state STEM teachers. This adventure has led to multiple publications with colleagues in other disciplines including the recent Attack of the Ice Aliens article (https://aasjournal.org/index.php/journal) and Anticipating Change: Pre-service Elementary Teachers Response to the Challenge of Incorporating Computer Science Activities into Their Future Classrooms (in press).

The HA work fuels her passion for multi-disciplinary work and undergraduate research and has given her the opportunity to lead over 50 undergraduates to present and publish at scientific venues since the Characterizing our DNA Exceptions (CODE) class started in 2018. In addition, she has been privileged to work with Prokop Lab at MSU on multiple publications in genomics including including work with SARS-CoV-2(https://www.jbc.org/article/S0021-9258(17)48472-9/fulltext ), Cystic Fibrosis (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00439-020-02211-w ), and SLC6A1(https://aasjournal.org/index.php/journal ).