Bethann Garramon Merkle

Bethann Garramon Merkle, MFA, leads communications and strategic planning initiatives for academic, community development, journalism, and public policy organizations. She uses and provides training on transdisciplinary approaches to enhance public engagement and inform institutional change. She was a first-generation college student and is a first-generation academic invested in demystifying academia’s hidden curriculum. She came to the University of Wyoming after former lives as a journalist, communications consultant, and director of nonprofits and educational programs, along with learning French the hard way (immersion, on a 4-year work visa in Quebec). Now, she teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on science communication and public engagement and has won the student-nominated UW-PIE Teaching Award, Promoting Intellectual Engagement in First Year Courses. After growing up in a small, rural town on Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, she finds the weather (and wind) in Laramie familiar. On the side, she seeks out walking and sketching near the world’s museums and waterways and approaches gardening in cold climates is an extreme sport. For information check out Bethann's biography in the Department of Zoology and Physiology.