The Robert F. Tinker Fellows program aims to promote innovation, creativity, and cross-disciplinary conversations in educational technology for STEM teaching and learning. Originally organized as a residency program, the fellowship was designed to bring individuals to the Concord Consortium to spark new ideas, tinker with novel technologies, cultivate outside perspectives, and provide opportunities for reflection on our work.
Many researchers visited Bob at the Concord Consortium to share ideas, work elbow to elbow on new grants, and turn early design concepts into prototypes. It is in this spirit that the Fellows Program was created.
Structure
The Concord Consortium typically hosts one fellow per year. We expect that the 2026 fellowship will be in person, though specific arrangements for an in-person or virtual “residency” will be coordinated with the fellow.
If possible, the fellow should plan to visit the Concord Consortium’s Concord, Massachusetts, office. The timing is flexible and based on mutual agreement between the fellow and the Concord Consortium. If the fellowship is virtual, the fellow must plan to meet regularly with our staff via video conference meetings.
Fellows contribute and participate in the following ways:
- Engage in work that either extends or enriches a current Concord Consortium project or develops the possibility of future collaborative work related to our mission.
- Produce something to leave behind at the Concord Consortium (paper, proposal, lesson idea, tabletop exhibit, model, or other artifact).
- Spend meaningful amounts of time interacting with Concord Consortium staff.
- Write a reflection and provide feedback on their experience.
- Host a presentation to Concord Consortium staff about their work, insights, and discoveries during their residency.
Fellowship themes
Robert F. (Bob) Tinker founded the Concord Consortium in 1994 and served as its dynamic and passionate president until 2009. He saw in technology the power to revolutionize how people learn and teach. And he continually pushed the limits of educational technology and pedagogies, pursuing ever more innovative ideas with new collaborators and partners. Bob’s earliest and enduring passion was a belief that education could open opportunities for all students. Bob passed away on June 21, 2017. With this fellowship, we remember his legacy and his unique personal qualities.
This year’s theme focuses on the application of innovations in artificial intelligence to transform teaching and learning. Proposals should address educational technology-related approaches in one or more of the following topics, or similar areas of research and scholarship:
- Novel or out-of-the-box applications of LLM technologies for teaching and learning in STEM
- Applications of neurosymbolic or hybrid human-AI systems to augment STEM teaching and learning
- Radical visions or AI-first designs for STEM learning tools
- Transformative applications of AI and machine learning for learning analytics or assessment of STEM teaching and learning
Honoraria
The Tinker Fellows Program includes a total honorarium of $5,000.
Selection process
Fellows will be selected by an application and review process. To apply please send the following materials to TinkerFellows@concord.org:
- CV or resume
- Two letters of references (include them with your application or ask them to be sent separately by the deadline)
- A proposal of what you plan to do during your fellowship (no more than 2,000 words)
Application deadline: December 31, 2025
Fellows will be notified by January 15, 2026
The committee to review applications includes members of the Board of Directors and staff.
Past Tinker Fellows
2025 Tinker Fellow Andrew Ross
2025 Tinker Fellow Devan Walton
2024 Tinker Fellow Bridget Druken
2023 Tinker Fellow Colby Tofel-Grehl
2023 Tinker Fellow Cristián Rizzi Iribarren
2022 Tinker Fellow Heather Barker
2022 Tinker Fellow Terrance Burgess
2021 Tinker Fellow Stephen Callahan
2020 Tinker Fellow Nicholas Horton
2019 Tinker Fellow Amy Hammett
Andrew Ross
Andrew Ross was a 2025 Tinker Fellow. He is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Eastern Michigan University (EMU). Andrew studied mathematics as an undergraduate and holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.
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Devan Walton
Devan Walton was a 2025 Tinker Fellow. He teaches computer science courses as an Adjunct Instructor at both Boston College and Middlesex Community College. He holds an M.A. in Learning Engineering from Boston College and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University at Albany.
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Bridget Druken
Bridget Druken was a 2024 Tinker Fellow. An associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at California State University, Fullerton, she teaches future elementary school, middle school, high school, and community college math teachers. She holds a master’s in mathematics from San Diego State University and a Ph.D. in mathematics education from San Diego State University/University of California San Diego. Her research interests include mathematics education, data science education, mathematical knowledge for teaching, preservice teacher preparation, professional development, and lesson study.
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Colby Tofel-Grehl
Colby Tofel-Grehl was a 2023 Tinker Fellow. Currently an associate professor of STEM and Science Education at Utah State University, Tofel-Grehl was a classroom teacher for elementary through high school students for over a decade before pursuing a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Virginia’s School of Education. As Principal Investigator of three National Science Foundation-funded grants and a GEAR-UP grant from the Department of Education, she focuses on the use of technology for both creating equitable STEM pipeline access and reimagining and reallocating the power structures that dictate whose histories and stories are told in classrooms.
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Cristián Rizzi Iribarren
Cristián Rizzi Iribarren was a 2023 Tinker Fellow. Rizzi Iribarren is an Educational Technology Specialist at the Ministry of Education of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a Visiting Professor in the School of Education at the University of San Andrés and at the Universidad de la Ciudad of Buenos Aires City. His work focuses on teacher professional development and helping teachers integrate technology into their subjects.
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Heather Barker
Heather Barker was a 2022 Tinker Fellow. Barker received a Ph.D. in Learning and Teaching in STEM Education from North Carolina State University in 2021 and is a lecturer in mathematics and statistics at Elon University. Inspired by her doctoral advisor Dr. Hollylynne Lee, she focuses her research on statistics education at the K-12 level. Using CODAP as her primary data investigation tool, she helps students ask questions about equity and social justice issues as reflected in datasets. With the aid of Elon’s Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity Education, Barker and a colleague developed the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Initiatives Inventory for Introductory College Statistics Courses.
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Terrance Burgess
Terrance Burgess was a 2022 Tinker Fellow. He earned a Ph.D. in Teaching and Curriculum with a focus on Science Education from Syracuse University in 2020. His dissertation investigated the impact of classroom instruction on the academic, racial, and science identity formation of students of color in an urban elementary school. A former high school teacher of biology, Earth science, and environmental science, Burgess is now an assistant professor of science education at Michigan State University where he instructs pre-service elementary teachers as well as graduate students.
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Stephen Callahan
We are delighted to announce Stephen Callahan as our 2021 Tinker Fellow. Callahan serves as the educational technology coordinator at the San Joaquin County Office of Education (SJCOE) FabLab. On any day of the week, that role might mean supervising staff, designing lessons, offering teacher professional development workshops, producing YouTube videos for CodeStack, or coordinating school field trips and events, including for children of local migrant farm workers, students from a rural one-school district or an inner-city school, or a robotics club. Before joining the SJCOE, Callahan was a high school teacher for 12 years, teaching chemistry, physics, and engineering, and constantly dreaming up ways to make learning fun with technology.
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Nicholas Horton
We are delighted to announce Nicholas Horton as our 2020 Tinker Fellow. The Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society (Statistics and Data Science) at Amherst College, Nick is an applied biostatistician with research interests in statistics and data science education. He uses computation to allow students to explore, model, and communicate insights from data. Nick is Co-PI of the NSF-funded Project MOSAIC, Co-PI of the NSF-funded Data Science WAV (Data Science for Social Good), and co-author of the CRC Press book “Modern Data Science with R.” He also works with the National Academies to identify structures to support undergraduate data science education. He plans to use his time in residence as a Tinker Fellow at both our Concord, Massachusetts, and Emeryville, California, offices to collaborate with our CodeR4MATH and CODAP projects and use these platforms to advance the field of data science exploration.
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Amy Hammett
We are delighted to announce Amy Hammett as our first Tinker Fellow recipient. Amy is currently completing a master’s degree in Gifted Education at Fort Hays State University. As a Kansas Master Science Teacher-in-Training and an NGSS curriculum developer, she writes classroom-level exemplar performance assessments for the State of Kansas. She has taught biology, Earth and space science, astronomy, forensic science, zoology, and science research classes at the high school level.
Amy is also active in the research and learning science communities, and is currently organizing a spring 2019 NSF Principal Investigator conference on learning with and about big data. The conference, organized together with Dr. Paul Adams, the NSTA Board Director of Pre-service Teacher Education, will map what has already been achieved in big data learning at the district and school level and set a clear direction for continuous progress. Building on this same line of work, Amy plans to use her time in residence at the Concord Consortium as a Tinker Fellow to develop curricular units for both teachers and students focused on developing data science skills.
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