Rachel Scherr
Rachel E. Scherr is an American physics educator and researcher who serves as an associate professor of physics at the University of Washington Bothell. Her work focuses on how students learn physics, including responsive teaching and active learning, as well as how video and gesture can reveal student thinking about energy and special relativity.
In high school she worked as an explainer at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She studied physics at Reed College, where a Watson Fellowship funded a year abroad to study physics education in Europe, Asia, and Africa. She earned her master’s degree in 1996 and her Ph.D. in 2001 from the University of Washington, with a dissertation on student understanding of basic concepts in special relativity supervised by Lillian C. McDermott and Stamatis Vokos.
After a brief period at Evergreen State College, Scherr was a postdoctoral researcher and research assistant professor at the University of Maryland from 2001 to 2010. She joined Seattle Pacific University as a research scientist in 2008 and moved to the University of Washington Bothell in 2018. She chaired the American Physical Society’s Topical Group on Physics Education Research in 2016 and was elected a Fellow of the APS in 2017 for her work on energy learning, classroom video analysis, and leadership in the physics education research community.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:10 (CET).