Freeberg Takes Program Reins
Freeberg Takes Program Reins
Todd Freeberg became the new director of the College Scholars Program August 1, 2020. He is a professor and associate head of the Department of Psychology and a joint faculty member in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Freeberg is a husband, father of a sixth grader, dog person, and a music lover (and a HUGE fan of Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival).
Freeberg has been at UT since 2002, after obtaining his PhD in biology from Indiana University and postdoctoral work in biological sciences and audiology and speech sciences at Purdue University. He regularly teaches classes in animal behavior, responsible conduct of research, and various topics in First-Year Studies. He loves Knoxville and East Tennessee, but being a winter person, he still does not handle summers here all that well.
Freeberg is in the neuroscience and behavior research area in the Department of Psychology, where he studies animal behavior with a focus on communication. His main area of research involves testing how variation in complexity and diversity of groups of animals affects their communicative, and broader social, behavior.
Animal behavior is an inherently integrative and often interdisciplinary field of study. Interdisciplinary approaches to research questions was one of the key reasons he was interested in the College Scholars program, where scholars excel at such approaches. He is thankful to Professor Kovac for all of his help and advice in making this transition. He will be a very tough act to follow.
Although much of the fall semester will likely still be online, Freeberg is hopeful that College Scholars work can be back to a face-to-face community as soon as possible. His key goals include increasing the diversity of students in the program, increasing the sense of inclusion and community among College Scholars, and increasing the voice and recognition of the program at the university.