Dr. Farah Bennani has been a Da Vinci Science Center Trustee since February 2022.

Dr. Farah Bennani is the inaugural STEM Dean at Northampton Community College. Prior to her current position, she served as the Business and STEM Division Dean at Mercer County Community College, a minority majority campus in New Jersey and served as Associate Dean for Science and Math at Colorado Community Colleges Online, an online consortium of 14 urban and rural community colleges in Colorado and Montana that supports over 138,000 students annually. She began teaching in 2001 at Metropolitan State University of Denver, a Hispanic Serving Institution, and has always been committed to the inclusion and the rightful presence of underprepared and underrepresented students. Her advocacy for student access and success has been woven through her teaching as a full-time microbiology faculty at Front Range Community College (FRCC) in Colorado and as a multi-campus chair for online Science, Math and Allied Health courses.

As a state-wide leader in STEM and online learning, she served as Vice-President of the Colorado Distance Learning Association and in 2018, won the eLearning Advocate of the Year Award from the eLearning Consortium of Colorado. Dr. Bennani championed and served as the Allied Health Curriculum Expert at the North American Network of Science Labs Online (NANSLO) developing remote-web based science labs (RWSLB) where she designed virtual online labs curricula that allowed students to remotely control lab activities. At ISTE, she has been involved in the Rapidly Responding to Current Events project, specifically with investigating and disseminating information on the cyber-attack on the French election. For Merlot, she regularly reviews OER textbooks and online lab workbooks. She has been involved in designing and teaching in several collaborative projects that included augmented reality, mobile learning and game based learning. One of her continuing seamless mobile learning activities, Project Outbreak was nominated for an eLCC Learning Technology award last year. She is founder and a member of the editorial board for University of Denver’s The Liminal: Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology in Education. She holds a patent from her Doctoral research in Microbiology, and an Analyst-Programmer Computer Sciences Degree. Her leadership in STEM and online learning has resulted in her teams being the recipients of multiple grants that focus on student engagement, multiculturalism, and immersive learning in the STEM field.

Farah has taught online, hybrid and web enhanced courses at FRCC, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, the Community College of Denver, Century College in Minnesota and currently at NCC. As a faculty member and an administrator, she continually disseminates information on effective eLearning and emerging technologies, which is not a common practice for an administrator. She is constantly working on how innovation can be added to instructional design and teaching to make learning more meaningful for students. She has been focused on leveraging technology to bring more OER content and resources into her area and reduce student costs. In addition, she has restructured several of the Lab Kits which improved alignment with course competencies and reduced costs to students.

She presents and publishes both nationally and internationally on emerging technology, augmented and virtual realities, adaptive learning, and game-based learning. Farah loves traveling and speaks six languages. She is a gadget girl and is happiest when she is exploring new technology, apps and mobile games.