Dr. Elizabeth Berkes is the Director of Faculty Development at De La Salle High School in Concord, CA. She has responsibility for overseeing, and coordinating all aspects of supervision, evaluation, and professional development for a faculty of 75 full and part-time teachers in a high school setting with an enrollment of over 1000 students. She works closely with other administrators to provide leadership for the Academic Affairs Council to continue to develop a rigorous, 21st Century curriculum in 8 academic disciplines. Elizabeth is also the director of the school’s mission-driven, data-informed accreditation process involving annual administration and analysis of 7 separate custom-designed surveys reaching nearly 3,000 individuals. She serves the Western Catholic Education Association (WCEA) as a Visiting Committee Chairperson using the Ensuring Educational Excellence (E3) accreditation protocol. In addition to these responsibilities, she is the lead administrator for the Stanford Challenge Success school partnership that address school culture, policies, and procedures that facilitate well-balanced, healthy students.
Previously, Elizabeth was the Research Assistant to the Director of WestEd's Assessment and Standards Development Services (ASDS) program, where she provided research assistance to a number of state, regional, and national efforts to develop and align standards and create integrated assessment systems, including the 29-state SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium.
Elizabeth received a Ph.D. in education from Washington University, where she was a Spencer Foundation Doctoral Fellow and a Doctoral Fellow at the St. Louis Center for Inquiry Science Teaching and Learning. She also received an M.S. in plant molecular and cellular genetics from UC San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and a B.S. in general biology from UC San Diego. She is a published author in science and in science education.