Lubi Lenaburg

Lubi Lenaburg earned her BS and MA degrees in Statistics at UCSB. While earning her MA, she worked as a teaching assistant and became very interested in education. She realized she had a passion for teaching as well as for educational research. She decided to pursue a PhD in education, with an emphasis in research methodology, at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UCSB. Her dissertation work focused on developing evaluation tools and innovative applications of existing statistical methods within education.

She is the evaluator for several projects at UCSB's Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships (CSEP), Materials Research Lab (MRL), Center for Nanotechnology and Society (CNS), the Mathematics Department, and the Department of Chemistry and Bio-Chemistry. These include the following NSF programs: STEP (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program), GK-12 (Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education), IMI (International Materials Institute), IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program), STS (Science, Technology, and Society), PIRE (Partnerships for International Research and Education), S-STEM (Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), and LSAMP Bridges to the Doctorate. Her experience has helped her learn to avoid common mistakes made in evaluation, and she has a good understanding of how NSF programs run and how to approach their evaluation. She also recognizes each program has its own set of goals, and that an evaluator must design a plan to best fit the individual needs of a program.

In 2008, she began coordinating the Apprentice Researchers summer program, where she gets to work with local high school students and UCSB graduate and post doctoral students. She believes that the experience of coordinating a program helps her keep a realistic perspective in how she approaches evaluation.