Tom Loughran

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT TOM LOUGHRAN

A social entrepreneur in an academic setting, I foster community in STEM education, civic life, and international development. After building a research community for high school students at a local school, I became Education Program Leader for I2U2, building online research communities in high energy physics, at Fermilab and eventually at the University of Notre Dame. I have been part of $5M in funding success since 2006, including the Notre Dame extended Research Community (NSF - GK12,$2.71M, reaching 500 teachers and K-12 students). I inaugurated the Collaborating for STEM Education, Research and Commercialization Forum series, held annually from 20••••20. I’ve been a regular peer reviewer for NSF since 2005, and served as chemistry advisor for the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence and the Indiana Department of Education. As part of my effort to integrate STEM community, I joined the enFocus Board of Directors (an innovative talent retention and development consultancy in South Bend, IN) and the OrthoWorx University Advisory Committee. These efforts to build community around STEM craft and culture have radiated into international development space. In 2006 I helped found the Board of Directors for BOSCO, Inc, an ICT4D project in Northern Uganda (in which connection I served on the advisory council for the Renewable, Innovative and Sustainable Electrification (RISE) project at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford); I still serve as vice president of the BOSCO Inc. board. Later I served as Co-PI and Uganda Country Manager for the Accenture-sponsored Connectivity for Education, Entrepreneurship and Electrification (CE3) project in Northern Uganda, working with the Pulte Institute for Global Development. These activities have involved guiding experiential learning activities for business students on well over a dozen projects with Accenture, HP, Dell, IBM, SunEdison, Google, and other corporate partners. More recently I have been researching and writing a book about social information processing, teaching physics lab courses to freshman majors, and curating/developing instructional resources in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Notre Dame.