Preetha Ram is the Associate Dean for Pre-Health and Science Education in the Office of Undergraduate Education at Emory College, co-founder of Inquus Corp, and co-director of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative. She also heads the Interdisciplinary Science Program for Integrating Science into Education (INSPIRE), Science Experience Abroad, Pre-Health Initiatives, and is the co-Dean for the Freshman year. Over the years at Emory she has founded several educational initiatives, such as the ChemMentors peer-to-peer learning program that has grown into the Supplemental Instruction model for Emory College and the International Research Experience for Science (IRES) fellowships.

Upbringing and Education

Preetha Ram was born in Chennai, India. She grew up in a household with a younger brother and sister. Her father Rajagopalachari Parthasarathy, was a railway engineer, and her mother Choodamani, a homemaker.

She received a Bachelor’s of Science in Chemistry from Women’s Christian College in Chennai, India, later receiving a Master’s of Science in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. She left for the United States in 1983 to pursue a PhD in Chemistry. Ram first enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she met her soon-to-be husband, Ashwin Ram

Ashwin Ram

Dr. Ashwin Ram is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing of the Georgia Institute of Technology, an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, an Adjunct Professor in the School of Psychology, and an Adjunct Professor in Department of Math &...

. They married in 1984. However, she left Illinois for Yale University in 1984; she found the biophysical chemistry offered at Yale more exciting and a better opportunity to pursue her studies. She received her MEMBA from the Goizueta Business School

Goizueta Business School

Goizueta Business School is a private business school of Emory University located in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. It is named after Roberto Goizueta, a former president of The Coca-Cola Company.-Academics:...

 in 2010. She lives in Palo Alto with her three children, Nikhil, Maya and Naveen, who used to attend Paideia School.

Emory

Preetha Ram has been at Emory since 1989. A former chemistry professor, she has taught Introductory Chemistry, Analytical chemistry, and Physical chemistry. She is currently in her third year as Assistant Dean, and has been doing what she can to change and to bring innovation to Emory, especially in the sciences.

In addition to her duties as Dean for the Sciences, she is responsible for advising first-year and transfer students and for overseeing the Dual Degree program with the Georgia Institute of Technology

Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States...

.

Currently, her focus is on needs of students pursuing the Health Sciences. She believes that Emory's liberal arts tradition and the excellence and proximity of the health sciences schools at Emory offers a unique opportunity to develop a health sciences framework for the liberal arts education that Emory is well-known for. Ram initiated a composite letter process for Emory College in 2009 and is currently setting up an Office for Health Sciences Mentoring for Emory Undergraduates which will be the one stop shop for all pre-health students' advising needs.

As Co-Director of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, she worked with the Dalai Lama to help develop a curriculum for educating the Tibetan monks. She directs ETSI with the intent to instruct Tibetan monastics on western science, including cosmology, biology, physics, chemistry, and neuroscience, balancing western thought with Buddhist theology. Ram was the editor of the instructional handbook used to instruct monastics, A Handbook of Science and The Structure of Science. ETSI oversees the curriculum and the overall development of this instructional model. The program hopes to have "a comprehensive science curriculum" within the realm of monastic education in place at the major academic monastic institutions by 2013.

Ram believes that international experience abroad is a critical part of the college experience for all students, but most particularly science students. Ram pioneered the first science summer study abroad program at Emory, Chemistry Studies in Italy and has followed this with replicating the model in Neuroscience in France, Environmental Science and Biology in Australia, and Global Health in South Africa. This study abroad program has won the Best Practices in International Education Award in 2007.

Ram is not afraid of controversy. She took on the challenge of bringing science and religion in close proximity through the Emory Tibet Science Initiative where she leads a team of faculty and monastics developing a science curriculum for Tibetan monastics. Ram took the lead in producing and editing the 376-page Handbook of Science that is currently used to instruct the monks in Western Scientific learning.

Most recently, she has cofounded an e-learning company, with a product, OpenStudy, that provides an online environment that facilitates peer to peer learning and collaboration.
She is a member of Project Kaleidoscope, an organization devoted to the improvement and sustainability of undergraduate programs in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Selected publications

The role of student tasks in accessing cognitive media types

Human Centric E-Learning and the Challenge of Cultural Localization