Erin Dolan is the founding Executive Director of the Texas Institute for Discovery Education in Sciences (TIDES) in the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. TIDES aims to integrate the teaching and research missions of the university by supporting experiential learning for undergraduates, offering professional development for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty, and evaluating the effectiveness of innovative science education programming. Dolan’s research focuses on understanding science research as an educational context. Her group studies scalable ways of engaging high school and undergraduate students in science research, mentoring of undergraduate researchers and research as a mechanism for undergraduates to access the social capital within the scientific community, especially for students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the sciences. She is principal investigator or co-investigator on more than $6 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and other agencies.