FCI's Faculty Advisory Board members have been crucial thought partners since the Foundational Course Initiative was established. Their disciplinary expertise and deep pedagogical experience help inform our strategic planning discussions, particularly as we develop plans for becoming an integral part of the University’s commitment to transformative and equitable teaching and learning.

Current FCI Faculty Advisory Board Members FA24-WN26

Michela Arnaboldi 

Michela Arnaboldi, Teaching Professor and Philip A Meyers Collegiate Lecturer, is an oceanographer and a geochemist. Her research has focused on past climate change in the Mediterranean Sea and North Atlantic. She teaches introductory and upper-level classes through the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, PitE, the Biological Station, and CGIS. Most of her classes focus on climate and oceanography.

Ezra Keshet 

Ezra Keshet, Associate Professor of Linguistics, chiefly works on theoretical semantics, the formal study of meaning in language. His earliest research addressed intensionality, or how language encodes ideas about times and situations different from the here and now. An area of current work is anaphora -- how pronouns can and cannot refer in various linguistic contexts. Other areas of interest include focus, conditional conjunctions (e.g., Take another step and I'll shoot!), and scholarship on teaching and learning. 

Professor Keshet regularly teaches the undergraduate and graduate introductions to semantics, as well as LING 111: Introduction to Language. He has officially supervised over 35 students on project topics such as tense, discourse structure, and prosody.

Gavin LaRose

Gavin LaRose is a Teaching Professor and the Karen Rhea Collegiate Lecturer in Mathematics and is currently the Department's Introductory Program Director.  In Mathematics, he has worked on curricular reform in two FCI courses, the Department's Introductory Program generally, and in other areas of its undergraduate curriculum.  He also assists with new instructor training and mentoring in the Department.  His career at the University of Michigan started in the Fall of 2000, after he had worked at Nebraska Wesleyan University (a small liberal arts college) for six years following completion of his doctoral work in applied mathematics at Northwestern University.

Sofia Saleem

Sofia G. Saleem is a Teaching Faculty in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She teaches foundational courses in Computer Science, such as Data Structures and Discrete Mathematics. She strives to help introduce students to the joys of computing and is mindful of using strategies and techniques to include a broad spectrum of student learners. Having spent many years on cutting-edge projects in the industry, she brings the perspective of industry application to her classroom. Sofia is particularly interested in supporting women in Computing and CS in the K-12 curriculum.

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