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To create and achieve awesome things in the world together, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) professionals need to be able to lead effectively. Leadership can be thought of as “a process of social influence through which an individual enlists and mobilizes the aid of others in the attainment of a collective goal” (Chemers, 2001). In the Institute for Scientist & Engineers Educators’ Professional Development Program (PDP), STEM graduate students and postdocs learned, practiced, and reflected on leadership skills and strategies explicitly. Design Team Leaders (DTLs) practiced leading their teams, all participants facilitated inquiry (led their students in learning), and some (in later years) learned through the inclusive leadership PDP strand. In this panel paper, we reflect on what we learned from these experiences and discuss how we apply PDP leadership training daily in our work beyond the PDP. We review key principles about inclusive leadership, such as building an image as a credible leader; how to lead meetings; and how to build feelings of motivation, belonging, trust, and shared ownership among team members. We also share case studies of our experiences applying PDP leadership training in roles as co-director for an African summer school, facilitator for a physics equity project, middle/high school math and science teacher, mentor for new teachers, teaching professor and online curriculum designer, and project manager for a non-profit. Last, we offer recommendations for stakeholders who want to support STEM graduate students’ and postdocs’ development as inclusive leaders. 

Instructor professional development in physics often focuses on a linear path towards using research-based teaching methods. However, this does not reflect how instructors frame their teaching. Instead, we propose a professional development focus on supporting physics instructors' creativity in teaching. Creativity is important as instructors teach in diverse contexts and hold diverse educational values. Creativity research indicates that having a well-structured space to explore many ideas can support creativity. We investigate this for the case of PhysPort, a website for physics professional development. We present results from interviews with PhysPort users, to show how they joyfully explore, feel trust in materials on the site because they are research-based, and use ideas from PhysPort creatively. We also discuss how better site organization could support users' creativity more. Through this case study, we encourage designers of instructor professional development to consider supporting instructors' teaching creativity as a key goal. 

PhysPort is a professional development website for physics faculty to develop their teaching through research-based resources. As part of PhysPort's ongoing research efforts, we conducted interviews with 23 physics faculty from diverse instructional and institutional contexts in the US. From our interviews, we sought common experiences, motivations, and pain points to develop personas--person-like constructs--of physics faculty in the US. Our research focuses on the perspectives of the key users of our site, and thus we take a user-centered perspective rather than a researcher-centered perspective. We developed personas, which are person-like constructs that are developed based on salient characteristics of actual users, that enable designers to create resources to meet actual user needs without designing for the idiosyncrasies of specific users. We present our set of six personas of physics faculty members: a faculty member who is new to improving his teaching; one who takes up his department's practices; one who wants her teaching to feel good; one who is comfortable in her teaching; one who is continuously improving; and one who solves big problems in her department. These personas of physics faculty making changes to their teaching can be used more broadly to improve the design and development of professional development resources and activities for physics faculty.