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We are excited to welcome our inaugural Faculty Fellows for Teaching Excellence: Dr. Libi Sunderman, Teaching Professor in Social Sciences, SIAS, and Dr. Leighann Chaffee, Teaching Professor, Sciences and Mathematics, SIAS. Beginning this Autumn, the two will serve one-year terms with the Office of Teaching Excellence, working towards a more connected, accessible, and inclusive teaching development ecosystem at UWT.
Together with OTE and the new Faculty Success Council, the Fellows will review existing teaching-development offerings, pilot lightweight infrastructure to make professional development easier to find and use, and help shape an assessment framework to track participation and impact. Each Fellow also leads a special project; you can read more about it below.
Dr. Libi Sundermann
Dr. Sundermann will lead an effort to expand the award-winning DLUX undergraduate research model into a generally available platform that promotes teaching excellence. In addition to a tool for individual faculty, the project will generate both quantitative and qualitative data that will inform OTE's faculty development efforts, provide practical guidance on AI ethics, and create a research model that can continue beyond the Fellowship's first year.
Dr. Libi Sundermann is a consistent, dynamic participant in faculty governance and faculty advocate, Dr. Sundermann teaches on-campus, online, and hybrid courses on modern Britain, the British Empire, empires and imperialism, food history, history methods, and World History I and II. Her training in online and hybrid instruction includes completing the required UWT iTech training and a Teaching Online Certificate from Quality Matters (QM).
Her teaching is built around growth mindset assessment — evaluating engagement and development over a term rather than a single polished product — with assignments scaffolded from lower-stakes practice to more demanding analytical work, designed to stay clear and navigable for a student population that is often working, raising families, or commuting long distances, earning many accolades. In addition to receiving th the UW Distinguished Teaching Award for Teams in 2024, Dr. Sundermann received the UWT Outstanding Women Award and a UW AAUP award: “Outstanding Contribution: Extraordinary Leadership and Advocacy to Advance the Conditions of Lecturers at the University of Washington: Courage in Pursuit of Excellence in Washington State Higher Education.”
Outside work, Sundermann recently traveled to Peru to hike the Inca Trail, and enjoys swimming, cycling, and reading and streaming sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery. She lives in Olympia with her husband, son (a 2026 UWT graduate), a dog, and two cats.
Dr. Leighann Chaffee
Dr. Chaffee will pilot BRAIN5 (Bringing Reflective Assessment to INtegrate the 5 core elements of effective teaching), a reflective-teaching initiative providing collegial course review templates, piloting faculty training, and identifying Ambassadors in Teaching Excellence to contribute to the training and participate in a Spring showcase.
Leighann Chaffee (she/her) is a teaching professor in her 16th year in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, with a primary appointment in Sciences and Math and secondary in Social Sciences. As an interdisciplinary scholar in neuroscience and biopsychology, Leighann studies the biological basis of motivation and eating behavior, currently employing computational neuroscience approaches with open science datasets. This training in neuroscience informs Leighann's teaching and inspires her to promote student success by mentoring undergraduate research and supporting global learning. Additionally, Leighann engages with the scholarship of teaching and learning, examining pathways by which college students acquire and apply self-regulated learning skills.
In her time at the UW, Leighann's service emphasizes student success through department, school, and tri-campus committees. Leighann is currently the co-coordinator of the Biomedical Sciences Major. Since 2022, she has served on the tri-campus Faculty Council for Teaching and Learning. On this committee, Leighann promotes efforts to implement the 5 core elements of effective teaching through student evaluations and collegial teaching reviews. She looks forward to the opportunity to extend this work to the UWT community and champion the inspirational teaching that anchors the UWT campus community.
