Cherie Lynn Ramirez
Dr. Cherie Lynn Ramirez is Associate Teaching Professor in the Chemistry and Physics Department at Simmons University, where she teaches courses in biochemistry, public health, and science advocacy. She is also associate faculty at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Among her current research projects are studying institutional mechanisms that promote healthy workplaces and improving access to medicines, including COVID-19 rapid tests, as a Collaborator of Global Access in Action (GAiA), a project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Her love of teaching and science blossomed as an undergraduate at Valencia College and later as a Biochemistry/Molecular Biology and Classical Studies double major at Rollins College in Central Florida. With the goal of being involved in teaching full-time someday, she participated in several teaching and mentoring activities throughout graduate school while earning her PhD in genetics at Harvard studying site-specific nucleases and their applications in genome engineering. After graduating in 2012, she completed her post-doctoral training at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health with a dual appointment as a Curriculum Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute so that she could support faculty and graduate students teaching global health across Harvard University. After her post-doc, she was promoted to be the Deputy Director of the global learning studios at the newly established Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University, where she developed strategies and capacities for supporting faculty experimenting with educational multimedia in collaboration with the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. After joining Simmons University, she served as the inaugural Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM) faculty fellow at the University’s Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET).
Among her distinctions, she has been recognized as an American Chemical Society Scholar, a two-time winner of the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, and the recipient of graduate fellowships from both the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Dr. Ramirez has found her experiences living in Mexico, Spain, and Belgium and traveling extensively within the United States and abroad to be among her most enriching catalysts for learning and inspiration.