KSTF Staff

Gene Fiorini, PhD Program Officer, Mathematics Knowles Science Teaching Foundation     photo: Yischon Liaw, 1000 Views Studios

Dr. Gene Fiorini came to the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation in June 2007 after more than twenty years as a teacher, professor and university administrator. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics (Extremal Graph Theory, 1993) from the University of Delaware. His dissertation studied some extremal properties of bipartite graphs of large girth. Throughout his career, Dr. Fiorini has expanded his interests to include areas of Mathematics Education and Statistics.

Dr. Fiorini holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Pennsylvania State University. After four years of teaching mathematics at Springside School in Philadelphia, PA, he returned to his graduate studies earning a Master’s of Science in Mathematics from the University of Delaware and a Master’s of Science in Applied Statistics from Temple University. He has also completed graduate work in Mathematics Education. Throughout his career he has received teaching awards from the University of Delaware and Shippensburg University where he was a faculty member, Associate Dean and Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Several of his projects include the creation of a college-level applications-based course for non-science and non-mathematics majors, Basic Math Models, the development of methods of instruction for visually-impaired students, the development of a capstone course for the Shippensburg University Honors Program, and participation in developing a series of online courses for the Pennsylvania Department of Education as a member of the Pennsylvania Workforce Resource Network. More recently he worked with Dr. Lucinda Elliott from the Biology Department to implement a new forensics concentration that gives students practical forensic science experience with the Cumberland County Forensics Laboratory.

In addition to consulting, conference presentations and numerous publications in both Mathematics and Mathematics Education, Dr. Fiorini co-authored the text Modeling Reality with Functions: Graphical, Numerical, Analytical (Dr. Jacob Miller), an applications-based approach to algebraic concepts that accompanies the Basic Math Modeling course he developed at Shippensburg University. He is currently working on another supplemental text that will serve as a series of scaffolded resource activities in Algebra and Geometry for high school teachers with limited resources.