Colby Tofel-Grehl
Emma Eccles Jones College of Education & Human Services
School of Teacher Education and Leadership

Faculty Researcher of the Year 

Dr. Colby Tofel-Grehl is an associate professor in the School of Teacher Education & Leadership. Her scholarship interrogates the structures, systems, and practices that foster inequities across STEM. She designs teacher professional development and curricular materials to facilitate historically minoritized rural youth’s success within STEM spaces. Her research has been published in high impact journals such as the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Journal of Science and Technology, Theory and Practice in Rural Education, Gifted Child Quarterly, and the Journal of Educational Research. Her funded grants exceed $23,000,000 of which she is principal investigator of over $20,000,000, including a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER grant. Additionally, Dr. Tofel-Grehl has received multiple national honors and awards including the 2019 Award for Significant Contribution to Educational Measurement and Research Methodology from Division D of the American Educational Research Association, the 2020 Early Career Science Teacher Educator of the Year Award from the Association for Science Teacher Educators. In 2021 NSF’s ITEST Program recognized her grant, ESTITCH, as one of three nationally outstanding projects broadening participation in STEM. Finally, she was named a 2022 University of South Carolina & National Science Foundation Institute in Measurement Methodology in Rural STEM Education (IMMERSE) Fellow.