Four Campuses. One Senate. Your Voice.
The University Senate is the representative body of the
Arizona State University Academic Assembly.
The University Senate is empowered by the Constitution (see ACD112-01) to “act for the Academic Assembly in matters relating to: academic affairs, personnel policies, faculty-student policies, finances and University services and facilities.” The Academic Assembly consists of all faculty (tenured/tenure-track and career track) and academic professionals who are employed at least .5 FTE, i.e. half-time, as well as members of the Emeritus College. This site provides timely as well as archived information regarding the work of the University Senate and issues facing the university community.
Announcement
The 2026-2027 meeting dates are now available. Please make sure to mark your calendars.
Senator spotlight
October 2026
Jennifer Donovan
Teaching ProfessorNew College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
Jennifer Donovan earned her bachelor's degree in evolutionary anthropology from SUNY Stony Brook in 1997. She earned her master's degree in education, focusing, curriculum and instruction in 2002 from the University of Phoenix and her master's degree in biology from St. Joseph College in 2005. Lastly, she earned her doctorate from Grand Canyon University in 2015. Donovan has taught both high school and college for a total of 25 years and has previously been certified to teach general science, biology, chemistry and all levels of algebra within the state of Arizona.
Her research experiences include work on folivory in Costa Rica, forage enhancement in Mexico, recovery work in Idaho along with lab-based biochemistry research in conjunction with Regents' Professor Petra Fromme. She has also worked with the AERO Institute and NASA to design radiation experiments for the STEM Excelsior Mission.
Her most recently published research involves the effectiveness of medical interventions for children with certain genetic disorders, published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, Part C. This ground-breaking research provides one of the first, larger sample size quantitative research studies in this specific field.
Donovan is particularly interested in the use of technology to aid in instruction and to garner interest into STEM fields for all students. She has performed outreach with several local high schools to promote this idea and is continually open to updating courses to reach out to broader audiences and provide real word applications to the study of basic and introductory chemistry. This has led her into the field of publishing easily available and inexpensive text material to benefit all students.
ASU News