Jessie L. Moore is Director of the Center for Engaged Learning and Professor of English: Professional Writing & Rhetoric at Elon University. She is the author of Key Practices for Fostering Engaged Learning: A Guide for Faculty and Staff (Stylus Publishing, 2023) and co-editor of five edited collections on engaged learning topics, including Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (with Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler and Paul Miller, CUR, 2018). As CEL’s Director, Jessie leads planning, implementation, and assessment of the Center’s research seminars, which support multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary inquiry on high-impact pedagogies and other focused engaged learning topics. She also produces the Center’s multimedia resources, including concise online guides on research-informed practices for engaged learning, videos, and podcasts. Jessie’s research examines engaged learning practices (including high-impact practices), mentoring, transfer of writing knowledge and practices, multi-institutional research and collaborative inquiry, the writing lives of university students, writing residencies for faculty writers, and faculty development (particularly as it relates to the teaching and practice of writing and to the scholarship of teaching and learning).

Tim Peeples is currently Senior Associate Provost Emeritus, and Professor of Humanities at Elon University. He also holds the position of Senior Scholar in the Center for Engaged Learning, an international research center that develops and synthesizes rigorous research related to high-quality, engaged learning in higher education. In addition to pursuing a wide range of scholarly projects, many aimed at advancing engaged teaching and learning, he has committed his final years before retirement to the teaching and mentoring of first-year students. Tim joined the Elon faculty in 1998 as founding Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, as well as Director of the Writing Center. Throughout his first 25 years at Elon, and especially his 19 years in administration, Tim’s work focused on enhancing faculty development, broadly understood, and advancing high-quality, high-impact educational practices and the campus intellectual climate. He was the first Faculty Administrative Fellow to serve in the Office of President, for then President Leo M. Lambert, from 2004 to 2006, where among other duties he helped establish Elon’s School of Law. Tim was one of the central figures in the study and establishment of the university’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, designed to advance the quality of teaching and learning across campus. He was later a key architect of and helped found Elon’s Center for Engaged Learning. Tim also helped found Elon’s Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society, Elon’s Center for Research on Global Engagement, Elon’s Center for Writing Excellence, and Elon’s Center for Design Thinking. 

Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler is a Professor of Psychology and founding Director of Elon’s Center for Research on Global Engagement at Elon University. Her scholarly interests include informal learning and play in early childhood; adult guidance of children’s inquiry and discovery; sociocultural and global contexts of learning; and undergraduate research mentoring. Maureen directed the Honors Program at Elon University from 2008 to 2013 and began to study academic mentoring during this time. She was a co-leader in the 2014-2016 research seminar on Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research with the Center for Engaged Learning. From 2020 to 2022, Maureen was an institutional leader of the “American Council on Education’s Learner Success Lab,” with a focus on “Mentoring for Learner Success.” Maureen has taught in and led study away/abroad programs in Hawai’i, London, Florence, and Copenhagen. Her research on global engagement encompasses intercultural learning and mentoring undergraduate research in global contexts, among other topics.