SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2025: Adirondack – Holly Ahern

Holly Ahern is an Associate Professor in the Science division at SUNY Adirondack and a past recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and SUNY Adirondack President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is the author of peer-reviewed articles and nationally published laboratory textbooks in cell biology and microbiology, including the first peer reviewed, open access online microbiology laboratory textbook adopted for use in both US and Canada. She was selected as a Fellow for the NSF funded Biology Scholars Program program administered through the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), which focuses on evidence-based teaching and learning practices for undergraduate biology and microbiology courses. In addition to teaching laboratory courses in microbiology, she also coordinates a program of undergraduate research that focuses on the effects of non-point source pollution in small residential lakes.

Ahern’s initial experience in developing and teaching online courses was during the worldwide pandemic of 2020, in which learning at most levels of education was driven to the online environment. As an outcome of this experience, she developed the first fully online microbiology laboratory course taught at SUNY Adirondack, initially using Blackboard LMS which transitioned to Brightspace in 2022. She presently teaches microbiology courses in both the traditional face-to-face and online modalities and strives for continuous improvement in the design and delivery of the curriculum using the OSCQR rubric. She recently earned the OSCQR Reviewer Badge from SUNY Online.