Alissa A. Lange, PhD, is an associate professor of early childhood education at East Tennessee State University. Prior to joining ETSU, Alissa was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Bogotá, Colombia, a U.S. Department of Education Institute of Educational Sciences postdoctoral fellow at SUNY Buffalo, and an assistant research professor at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University. She received her PhD in psychology from Queen’s University Belfast, where she found a whole island of people who share her passion for football (you may know it as soccer). Alissa has led or co-led many early STEM teaching and learning initiatives, including the National Science Foundation-funded preschool STEM professional development project SciMath-DLL (along with Kimberly Brenneman). She has disseminated the results of her work to audiences across the United States and internationally, including in the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly, in NAEYC’s Teaching Young Children, and for members of Congress in 2015. She lives in Jonesborough, Tennessee, with her husband and three children, ages 2, 5, and 6. Her young scientists regularly remind her to be persistent in her pursuit of becoming a better parent, educator, and learner.