Excellence in Education Award

2025 Winner: Amy Marshall-Colón

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Amy Marshall-Colón has emerged as a leader in education, mentoring, and outreach. Amy has over ten years of experience teaching at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she employs evidence-based pedagogical approaches that emphasize active learning and student-led inquiry. She regularly teaches an undergraduate course in the Genomics of Human Health for pre-med undergraduate majors, and she has developed two graduate-level courses in Biological Networks and in Plant Metabolomics. Amy routinely leverages plant examples and case studies to engage students in all of her courses. Amy has been recognized for her teaching effectiveness both at the University of Illinois and nationally. Amy has twice received the honor of being on the “List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students”. Amy is passionate about reducing barriers to students becoming involved in computational biology. In 2016 she published a Teaching Tool in Plant Biology entitled “A Bioinformatics Pipeline to Understand Transcriptional Regulation in Plants” in affiliation with an education focused issue of The Plant Cell. This module has been implemented at multiple institutions that span the globe. Moreover, Amy partnered with a local community college to develop a flexible, part-time internship program for community college students to gain research experience in bioinformatics. This novel format helps meet the needs of non-traditional students that are unable to participate in REUs and other full-time programs due to life demands. Amy has a reputation as an effective research mentor and has provided high-impact training experiences to six PhD students, two MS students, four postdocs, four visiting scholars, and approximately 40 undergraduate researchers, including multiple students who have received the ASPB SURF award.