Michelle Cirillo is a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) whose scholarship centers on studying and improving the teaching and learning of mathematics. She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, with an emphasis in mathematics education, from Iowa State University in 2008 and her Master’s degree from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Northern Arizona University in 1996. Before joining NJIT, she spent fifteen years as a faculty member in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware.  Earlier in her career, she taught calculus and statistics at the community college level and high school mathematics in New York for eight years.

Cirillo’s scholarship in secondary mathematics education spans three connected lines of work: the teaching and learning of mathematical processes, particularly proof and mathematical modeling; classroom discourse; and secondary mathematics teacher education. Much of this work leverages Grossman’s idea of decomposition of practice — breaking a complex practice into parts that can be taught and learned — to the processes of proving and modeling, an approach she developed through a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Working closely with secondary teachers, she built and tested a pedagogical framework for teaching students to prove in geometry, developed professional-learning materials for productive and purposeful classroom discourse, studied new models of early field experience in teacher preparation, and, more recently, taken up calculus instruction.

As principal investigator or co-principal investigator, she led or collaborated on research projects supported by more than $6 million in external funding, primarily from the National Science Foundation. She has served on the advisory boards of several federally funded research projects and professional organization committees, and she’s consulted with mathematics curriculum developers on the teaching of proof and modeling. Her published work includes books on mathematical modeling and on classroom discourse — most recently Unlocking the Mystery: Mathematical Modeling in Secondary Classrooms, coauthored with John A. Pelesko — along with dozens of journal articles and book chapters. She was the lead author of an article honored with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ Research and Practice Outstanding Publication Award, held a research fellowship from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation for a multi-year study of proof in high school geometry, and served as an associate editor of the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. She has also been an invited guest on mathematics education podcasts.

At NJIT, Cirillo teaches calculus and precalculus and trains graduate teaching assistants to lead mathematics recitations — work that draws directly on her background as a mathematics teacher educator. She also serves as the faculty liaison for the Math Success Initiative, a partnership among NJIT, the City of Newark, and the Newark Board of Education that supports STEM-interested Newark high school students to pursue their goal of becoming first-generation college students at NJIT.