It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Phyllis Katz on January 24th, 2025. She was a dedicated science educator who made great contributions to the Informal Science Education community.

Phyllis Katz began her career as a teacher in New York City and started the afterschool science program, Hands-on-Science Outreach (HSO), in 1980. Under her leadership, HSO grew into a national and international program serving tens of thousands of youths. Phyllis' interest in research grew as the afterschool programs expanded. She began to focus on how questions about outcomes could be answered without the methods of school science testing. She was inspired by the use of visual methods, including drawings and photography, as data to support and research the science teaching identity of teacher candidates and the scientist identity development within families.

Phyllis was an active member of the informal science community in the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) and the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST), where she advocated for the recognition of the work of informal science educators. In the NSTA, she was appointed Chair of the Informal Science Advisory Board from 1995-1998. She led the team that wrote the first NSTA Position Statement on Informal Science Education and in 1999 received NSTA's Informal Science Educator award. At NARST, she was an active participant in the informal science education strand since its inception.

Phyllis served on the Advisory Board for the Magic School Bus TV series and worked with Children's Television Workshop on the development of an afterschool component for one of their TV math series.

She received her PhD in Science Education from the University of Maryland in 2002 and authored numerous books and articles on research and practice in informal science education.

Her obituary can be found here.

10-24-2024