caise

After three years with CAISE and more than thirty years with the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), Wendy Pollock has announced that she will be leaving the organization and moving to Chicago in July to work independently on projects that advance conversation and reflection across the informal science education field. Among these projects is the community website ExhibitFiles, which was founded in 2007 in collaboration with Ideum and a group of exhibition practitioners.

Pollock joined ASTC in 1980. For many years, she led the Exhibition Services program, which was responsible for tours of nearly 200 exhibitions across North America as well as development of the first exhibition about global warming, Greenhouse Earth. She also led development of ASTC Dimensions, the bimonthly news journal of the science center field, and the association's first Web projects, including the online learning center ASTC Connect. Other initiatives included the Humanities Seminars in Science Museums program, which for several years was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Pollock has coedited and coauthored a number of works, including Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions, and earlier served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Museum Education.

CAISE was founded in 2007 as a partnership among ASTC, Oregon State University, the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments, and the Visitor Studies Association, under a cooperative award from the National Science Foundation. Pollock served as principal investigator and director during the center's start-up years.