Connie Hvidsten joined BSCS as a Science Educator in January 2011. She is currently a professional development leader in Science Teachers Learning from Lesson Analysis (STeLLA), a research-based professional development project working to improve science teaching in upper-elementary classrooms. She is also part of a BSCS team developing curriculum for the National Institutes of Health that is designed to help grades K–12 students understand type 2 diabetes and the dietary and lifestyle choices that will help reduce the chance of developing type 2 diabetes over their lifetimes.

Before joining BSCS, Connie worked as a professional developer and project coordinator with the Sacramento Area Science Project and the Sacramento State Center for Math and Science Education. She served as science curriculum specialist for the Sacramento County Office of Education and spent 13 years as a middle school science teacher with the Sacramento City Unified School District.

Connie has a B.S. from Washington State University in Environmental Science. She is completing her doctorate at the University of California, Davis, in Science Education. Her research focuses on model-based reasoning as a practice common across the scientific disciplines and as a productive pedagogical tool in science classrooms, as well as studying the degree to which teachers take up modeling practices after an intensive two-year program of professional development and classroom implementation.