Student & Alumni Profiles

Mary Caddle

Degrees: B.S. Chemical Engineering, University of New Hampshire

After working first as an engineer and then as a business analyst, I realized that the best part of any job I had held was trying to make sense of what people knew and helping them work towards the next level of understanding. I also felt that I wanted to be involved in an endeavor that would be helpful to our world, so my thoughts turned to education, mathematics, and science, and the Tufts MSTE program was the perfect fit.

My main research interests are in analyzing student thought in algebra, and in the relationships between teacher and student mathematical thought. I have been a research assistant with the Early Algebra project since I arrived at Tufts, and I also work with the Tufts University Problem Solving and Discrete Mathematics workshop for teachers of grades 5-9. I am now starting my own research on mapping teacher and student understanding of introductory combinatorics.