Research fellow
Dr. Cheryl Burleigh has been associated with the University of Phoenix since 2008, is a certified advanced facilitator and Lead Faculty Area Chair of Mathematics and Sciences for the College of Humanities and Sciences Bay Area Campus. She is a faculty member for the College of Humanities and Sciences both online and at her local campus. Dr. Burleigh also serves as a Faculty Supervisor for the College of Education. While working in Silicon Valley as a lead engineer on the AMRAAM and Patriot Missile projects, Dr. Burleigh decided to follow a lifelong dream of teaching the sciences, specifically chemistry at the high school level.
While earning her MS in Education and teaching in the classroom of an urban high school, Dr. Burleigh saw the need to increase enrollment of female students in the sciences, specifically the physical sciences. The result, her master’s thesis research project entitled How to Encourage High School Females to Enroll in the Physical Sciences. The findings of her research lead to modifications in career counseling and enrollment practices at the high school which saw a dramatic increase in enrollment of high school females in the physical sciences. Consequently, a significant number of these high school female students pursued and graduated with college degrees in STEM related fields.
Dr. Burleigh’s career focus of fostering and nurturing a love of the physical sciences provided opportunities to work for NASA, develop engaging curriculum for Project ASTRO, STELLAR and other programs besides her own classroom. Dr. Burleigh has been a presenter of science education curriculum and practices and educational leadership for school programs and administrators, state teacher associations, national and international conferences, and on behalf of NASA. Additionally, Dr. Burleigh has been an educator and administrator overseas in Luanda, Angola, on two separate occasions, and Lagos, Nigeria.
As an administrator, Dr. Burleigh has continued to encourage her staff to develop and implement challenging and dynamic STEM related curriculum and programs for each of the schools for which she has had the privilege of serving. Thereby, increasing the rigor and relevance of curriculum to develop deeper critical thinking and deriving relationships between academic and real-world applications in problem solving.
Dr. Burleigh earned her doctorate degree in Educational Leadership-Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Phoenix. She earned a bachelor of science in Chemistry and bachelor of arts in History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a master of science in Education-Curriculum from California State University East Bay. Dr. Burleigh holds teaching credentials in Physical Science, Introduction to Mathematics, Biology, Comparative Political Systems & International Relations and Social Sciences, in addition to credentials for education leadership and administration.