Keynote Speaker
Dr. Isis Artze-Vega
Cultivating Connection, Sustaining Joy: Helping Students—and Ourselves—Thrive
During this interactive keynote, we’ll explore compelling evidence that trusting human relationships—with faculty, staff, and peers—are essential to student learning, persistence, and well-being. We’ll also consider how relationship-rich education benefits educators themselves, fostering connection, meaning, and joy in our work. Participants will leave with practical strategies for cultivating trusting relationships with students, for helping students build the networks they need to thrive, and for drawing on meaningful relationships to sustain their own well-being.
Isis Artze-Vega, Ed.D. is a research professor at American University’s Advancing College Teaching for Student Success National Center, where she provides leadership for the Alliance for Better College Teaching, a national initiative to improve college teaching at scale and thereby advance student learning and success. She is the lead author and editor of the The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching and co-author of Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education and the forthcoming Scaling Relationship-Rich Education: How Institutions Build Cultures Where Students Thrive. Most recently, Isis served as college provost and vice president for academic affairs at Valencia College.
Expert Panelist
Day two will celebrate 25 years of the Annual Faculty Conference by featuring a panel of faculty members from throughout the region who have been recognized for their excellence in teaching. They will share what they have discovered about learning, how they translate those lessons into practice, and how they have fostered curiosity and experimentation in their own learning environments.
Dr. Abby Guido
Dr. Abby Guido is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Design and Illustration at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where she has taught for 14 years. A recipient of Temple’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, she teaches across the Graphic and Interactive Design, UX/UI Design, and Illustration and Emerging Media programs, and has also taught at Temple University Japan and Temple Rome. Her teaching is student-centric: she builds courses around who is in the room, prioritizes collaboration and critique as shared learning, and gives students room to experiment, fail, and find their own way to a solution. Courses like Design Play, which treats game design as a vehicle for creative problem solving, reflect that approach. As Chair, she oversees the department’s BFA and programs and leads curriculum development. Before joining Tyler, she founded Abby Ryan Design. She holds a BFA and an MBA from Temple University
Dr. Rachel Juergensen
Dr. Rachel Juergensen is an Associate Professor of Special Education and Special Education Program Coordinator at Delaware State University. Her research focuses on equitable opportunities for students with disabilities and students experiencing difficulty in the K-12 classroom. Her current $1.06 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs, Project DE-SPEC (Delaware Special Educator Certification), aims to provide full tuition support and mentoring to current practicing teachers who want to pursue a certificate in special education and better support and improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Because of her outstanding work with scholars in the special education program, she was awarded the Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Dr. James K. Martin II
Dr. James K. Martin II, PhD, is the Educational Developer for STEM at the Center for Teaching Excellence at the George Washington University, where he helps lead the Center’s work on ethical AI integration and partners with faculty across the sciences, engineering, computing, and the health professions on course design and assessment. He came to GW from the Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine, where he co-directed the Program on AI in Medicine, directed the cardiovascular and renal physiology block, and, with Dr. Jeffrey Powers, developed Professor Dobbi, a domain-constrained Socratic AI tutor whose pilot showed a 67% reduction in D/F rates. The work received Rowan University’s President’s Award for Excellence in Innovative Instructional Delivery and AACOM’s SOME Innovation in Medical Education Award in 2026. He holds a PhD in molecular biology from Princeton University.
Dr. Philip Nelson
Dr. Philip Nelson is Professor of Physics at University of Pennsylvania, where he has created new courses on biophysics and currently directs the major program. Nelson has also served as Chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Biological Physics. He is the author of the textbooks “Biological Physics,” “From Photon to Neuron,” “Physical Models of Living Systems,” and the forthcoming “Electromagnetic Phenomena.”
Dr. Jeffery Powers
Dr. Jeffery Powers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Education and Scholarship at the Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine (SOM). He earned his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Physiology from Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, where his research focused on differential interventricular microRNA expression in heart failure. He is currently the Associate Director of the Problem-Based Learning Curriculum in the Rowan-Virtua SOM. He is also the director of the Musculoskeletal block in the PBL I curriculum and delivers many lectures within the SGL curriculum, including lectures on biochemistry, cardiovascular physiology, and microbiology. He serves as course director of the Biochemistry and Exercise Physiology courses in the Master of Biomedical Sciences Program and of the Advanced Physiology and Pathophysiology course in the Physician Assistant Program. He is also the faculty sponsor for the Music Medicine Club.
