Chandra Turpen is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park with the Physics Education Research Group. She completed her Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Chandra draws on perspectives from anthropology, cultural psychology, and the learning sciences to design and research contexts for learning within higher education. Chandra focuses on studying faculty as learners within professional-development and workplace settings, and studying undergraduate students as learners in undergraduate interdisciplinary physics and engineering classrooms.

She build explanatory theories of learning and pragmatically links these theoretical insights to the design of learning environments. Through in-situ studies of classroom and institutional practice, Chandra focuses on the role of culture in science learning and educational change. Chandra pursues projects that have high potential for leveraging sustainable change in undergraduate STEM programs and makes these struggles for change a direct focus of her research efforts.