Biography
Dr. Andrea Henle
AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow
Division of Computer and Network Systems
Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Class of 2024-2026
Dr. Andrea Henle joins the U.S. National Science Foundation with an extensive background in higher education and as a biomedical researcher, specifically in the areas of cancer biology and immunology. She received her undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota. She completed her doctorate in biomedical sciences – immunology at the Mayo Clinic, where she investigated mechanisms to get immune cells to recognize breast cancer. She subsequently completed a teaching and research postdoctoral fellowship in cancer biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she developed an animal model for the most common eye cancer, uveal melanoma. As a fellow at MIT, she spent a semester teaching undergraduate biology in Singapore and learning about climate change and sustainability in urban environments. Henle has been a professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin for the past 10 years, where she has been funded by grants from NASA and NSF for work supporting research, education, and training for undergraduates and grade 6-12 students and teachers. Henle has helped support the development of teachers in training and those in high-need school districts for nearly a decade.
Henle is interested in the emergence of artificial intelligence and its use as a technology for the benefit of underserved and low-resource communities. She is also interested in exploring how AI is impacting science education and research and how it can be used to promote equity and inclusion across STEM education. Her experience leading undergraduate students in study abroad courses to Singapore and Taiwan led to her recent interest in environmental sustainability and climate change, and she looks forward to exploring how these interests intersect in her role at NSF.