August 29, 2017
Tucson, AZ – August 29, 2017 — is proud to announce that Kristin Umland, Vice President for Content Development, is the recipient of the Association for Women in Mathematics’ (AWM) twenty-eighth annual Louise Hay Award. Dr. Umland will be presented with the award at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, CA in January 2018 in recognition of her leadership and contributions advancing large-scale improvement in mathematics education. The recipient of the 2017 Louise Hay Award was Cathy Kessel, making this is the second year in a row that a member of the Illustrative Mathematics team has been honored.
“Kristin is a driving force behind the Illustrative Mathematics 6–8 Math curriculum, and a model for the profession of a true mathematician educator,” said Dr. William McCallum, Founder and President of Illustrative Mathematics.
Prior to joining Illustrative Mathematics full time in 2016, Dr. Umland was on the faculty of the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of New Mexico. While there, she revamped mathematics courses for non-mathematics majors and for prospective teachers, led collaborative professional development projects for K–12 teachers in New Mexico, and investigated the impact of Math Teachers’ Circles. In 2011, her support of the national K–12 mathematics community in the transition to the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSS-M) led to her collaboration with Dr. McCallum, the leader of the CCSS-M writing team, to launch Illustrative Mathematics, a non-profit organization created by mathematicians, mathematics educators, and teachers that illustrates how CCSS-M can be effectively implemented.
As Vice President for Content Development, Dr. Umland has been instrumental in overseeing the development by a group of 100 editors and 550 reviewers of more than 1,200 highly vetted tasks illustrating CCSS-M. She is also the lead author of Illustrative Mathematics 6–8 Math, an Open Educational Resource math curriculum. Throughout her career, Dr. Umland has effectively bridged the domains of mathematics, education, and policy as evidenced by the many workshops and sessions that she has organized for national meetings, bringing together veteran and emerging scholars from the fields of mathematics and mathematics education.