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The Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) seeks to improve undergraduate STEM education for students from all backgrounds and regions across the United States, in all higher education settings. To achieve this, PULSE engages academic departments in three complementary programs (Recognition, Ambassador, and Regional Networks) that provide department-level professional development aimed at developing skills and knowledge relevant to promoting change in their educational programs aligned with recommendations of Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education (Brewer & Smith, 2011). These programs emphasize how institutional change works and build practical skills for engaging colleagues, holding productive discussions, and reaching consensus. To support evaluation efforts for continuous improvement, PULSE made the causal links between program activities and outcomes explicit by creating program-specific pathway models grounded in a unifying Theory of Change (ToC). Pathway modeling, a widely used tool for evaluation planning, clarified how program activities develop core capacities, enable transformation strategies, and culminate in department-level outcomes. Developing these models highlighted design elements of PULSE’s programs that we propose are key to departments enacting and sustaining change. Both the process and outcomes of our approach can inform the efforts and evaluation of other STEM transformation organizations. This model provides departments and networks with a map that outlines what to measure, when, and why. This moves departmental change efforts from workshop learning to sustainable program change. 

To facilitate its goal of fostering department transformation, the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) organizes some of its work into five geographic regions and leverages the expertise of the PULSE Fellows in each region. This article examines how these Regional Networks have driven department-level changes through outreach activities, use of the PULSE Rubrics as a diagnostic tool to help departments to advance the Vision and Change recommendations, and implementation of the PULSE framework to address local needs and challenges. We present impact data through Regional Network activities and identify commonalities in successes and challenges across all the geographic regions. Through reports from the Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, Northwest, and Midwest Great Plains, we highlight each Regional Network’s accomplishments in influencing the adoption of PULSE strategies to implement the Vision and Change recommendations to transform departments. 

We review scientific ocean drilling of the New Jersey passive continental margin and the success of Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP1) Expedition 313 in addressing long-standing, fundamental issues of sequence stratigraphy, sea-level change, and resources. The New Jersey margin was targeted for study by several generations of ocean drilling because of its thick, prograding Oligocene to Quaternary sequences bounded by unconformities. Coring and logging on the onshore coastal plain (Ocean Drilling Program [ODP] Legs 150Xh ttp://www-odp.tamu.edu/publications/citations/cite150X.html and 174AX), outer continental shelf (Leg 174A), and continental slope and rise (Legs 95, 150, and 174A) provided a chronology of sea-level lowerings but did not sample facies needed to evaluate Miocene sea-level amplitudes. Expedition 313 used a Mission Specific Platform (L/B Kayd) to drill on the shallow continental shelf, recover critical Miocene facies, particularly on clinoform foresets, and capture the full amplitudes of relative sea-level changes. Expedition 313 overcame challenging borehole conditions and recovered a total of 1311 m of core at three sites (81 % recovery) that: (1) correlated difficult-to-date nearshore-shelf facies to the time scale with resolution better than ±0.5 million years (Myr); (2) tested and confirmed that sequence boundaries are a primary cause of seismic reflections on siliciclastic shelves; (3) tested sequence stratigraphic models with core-log-seismic integration; and (4) provided a record of paleodepth changes through time that constrained amplitudes of Miocene sea-level change, including the influence of mantle dynamic topography. The New Jersey relative sea-level estimates are similar to those obtained using stable isotopes and Mg/Ca paleothermometry, showing that GMGSL (“eustasy”) varied with 10–60 m scale amplitudes on the Myr scale. Drilling beneath the shallow continental shelf also identified groundwater sources, including seawater, deepsourced brines, and meteoric fresh water, that represent potential resources for future generations. Studies of this margin have implications for future subsurface storage of supercritical CO2 and geotechnical issues relating to the location of offshore wind infrastructure. Expedition 313 demonstrated the feasibility of continuously recovering and logging strata in shallow water, providing constraints on sea level, sequences, hydrogeology, and resources. 

Dephasingless laser wakefield acceleration (DLWFA), a novel laser wakefield acceleration concept based on the recently demonstrated “flying focus” technology, offers a new paradigm in laser-plasma acceleration that could advance the progress toward a TeV linear accelerator using a single-stage system without guiding structures. The recently proposed NSF OPAL laser facility could be the transformative technology that enables this grand challenge in laser-plasma acceleration. We review the viable parameter space for DLWFA based on the scaling of its performance with laser and plasma parameters, and we compare that performance to traditional laser wakefield acceleration. These scalings indicate the necessity for ultrashort, high-energy laser architectures such as NSF OPAL to achieve groundbreaking electron energies using DLWFA. Initial results from MTW-OPAL, the platform for the 6-J DLWFA demonstration experiment, show a tight, round focal spot over a distance of 3.7 mm. New particle-in-cell simulations of that platform indicate that using hydrogen for DLWFA reduces the amount of laser light that is distorted due to refraction at ionization fronts. An experimental path, and the computational and technical design work along that path, from the current status of the field to a single-stage, 100-GeV electron beam via DLWFA on NSF OPAL is outlined. Progress along that path is presented. 

Online professional development (PD) can support broader accessibility than traditional face-to- face PD. However online delivery presents challenges for characteristics of high-quality PD, such as collaborative knowledge building and community development, that have proven positive outcomes in face-to- face modes. A few comparative studies have demonstrated equivalent outcomes when PD activities have been translated from a successful face-to-face implementation to an online format. This study investigates whether an online version of PD for high school biology teachers on using computer-supported complex systems curriculum and instruction can achieve the same high impact as the face-to-face version. We describe changes in design decisions to accommodate the online mode and measure impact on teachers’ perceptions of their experiences and student outcomes. The results show positive teacher perceptions in both PD formats and roughly equal student outcomes. However, teachers articulated other benefits to online activities that indicate opportunities for improved access to high-quality PD.