Cassandra Volpe Horii, Ph.D., serves as the associate vice provost for education and director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford in February 2022, Horii served as the assistant vice provost and founding director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach at Caltech, where she led efforts to advance and support inclusive, evidence-based teaching across disciplines. She was a founding member of the National Academies Roundtable on Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education from 2018 to 2024, and served as president of the POD Network in Higher Education in 2018-19. Her prior institutional roles have included inaugural dean of the faculty at Curry College in Milton, MA, where she created the Faculty Center, and associate director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University.
As a first-generation student in higher education, Horii earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a doctorate in atmospheric chemistry in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science from Harvard University. She has taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses on university teaching and learning in STEM, atmospheric science, environmental chemistry, expository writing, and sustainability. Her scholarship has addressed topics such as the roles of centers for teaching and learning in institutional change and accreditation, the experiences of faculty with disabilities, inclusive and equity-minded teaching and mentoring, educational spaces and technologies, teaching consultation methods, and projects related to writing and visual rhetoric in higher education.