Annie Connolly-Sporing provides her students with an intentional, personalized, and engaging education that challenges them to stretch their capabilities. She believes it is important for science as a whole to include larger discussions of representation and identity, and wants her students to think critically about science beyond reactions, compounds, and the biological building blocks of life.

Ms. Connolly-Sporing holds a B.S. with Honors in Chemistry from Haverford College, with a concentration in biochemistry, as well as certification from the American Chemical Society. While at Haverford, she was a recipient of a William Hartzell Trust Scholarship, awarded to students showing “unusually high promise of future distinction.” Ms. Connolly-Sporing’s thesis research was titled “Studies toward the CRISPR-Cas9 mediated knockdown of four β-octopamine receptors in the western honey bee (Apis mellifera),” which involved alteration of the four genes related to appetite suppression in honeybees. This research was a pilot experiment of a larger study which would attempt to scale up this work, followed by a series of behavioral assays, with the goal of publication in an academic journal.