Project Lead
American Physical Society
Kathryne Sparks Woodle is an Education Programs Lead at the American Physical Society (APS) in College Park, Maryland. In addition to the FTI, she currently serves on the leadership team of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Initiative, which has created a set of resources covering every aspect of operating a thriving undergraduate physics program. Additional APS projects with which she has been involved include: the APS Innovation Fund, the Gordon & Betty Moore Fundamental Physics Innovation Awards, the APS National Mentoring Community, STEP UP, the NSF INCLUDES: Inclusive Graduate Education Network, the APS Bridge Program, and the Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC). Through these initiatives, Woodle works to promote an inclusive professional community that supports marginalized groups.
Prior to coming to APS, Woodle received her PhD in particle astrophysics from the Pennsylvania State University. Woodle worked on detecting very high-energy emission from gamma-ray bursts with the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory. The HAWC observatory is an extensive air shower detector built at 4100m in Sierra Negra, Mexico. Woodle also has received a Master's in Education from the Physics Department at Penn State and her BA in physics from Grinnell College.