Vilma Mesa

Vilma Mesa is a professor of education and mathematics at the University of Michigan and a faculty associate at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. She investigates the role that resources play in developing teaching expertise in undergraduate mathematics, specifically at community colleges and in inquiry-based learning classrooms. Mesa has conducted several analyses of instruction and textbooks and has collaborated in evaluation projects on the impact of innovative mathematics teaching practices for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

She served as associate editor for the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education from 2000 to 2004 and is currently serving as associate editor for Educational Studies in Mathematics. Mesa was a research associate at “una empresa docente,” a math education research center at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. While there, she coauthored the precalculus textbooks for engineering students and the probability and statistics textbooks for social science majors at the university. Mesa has published over 60 articles and book chapters in mathematics education and raised over $2 million in federal funding to support her work.

Prior to her career in education, Mesa was a systems programmer for the ministry of finances in Colombia and for the district of Bogotá and a computing systems advisor for a large construction and hospitality firm in Colombia. She has a BS in computer sciences and a BS in mathematics from the University of Los Andes and an MA and a PhD in mathematics education from the University of Georgia.