Founder and Director of the Exploratorium's Institute for Inquiry was a champion for science education
SAN FRANCISCO (September 9, 2024) – The Exploratorium is deeply saddened to announce the recent passing of Lynn Rankin, 77, in San Francisco.
A champion for science education, Lynn was the founder and longtime Director of the Exploratorium’s Institute for Inquiry (IFI), a national professional development center for K–5 leaders and practitioners of elementary science education. Lynn fiercely believed in the power of professional development for educators, and her work empowered generations of teachers and students across California and beyond to be excited about inquiry and discover the joys of science.
Lynn was a San Francisco Unified School District elementary teacher before joining the Exploratorium in 1975. She founded IFI in 1995, with National Science Foundation (NSF) funding, as a national center filling a critical gap in the nation’s science education system, namely, the tremendous lack of professional development capacity at the elementary level. IFI provides professional developers with workshops, strategies, tools, resources, and an intellectual community of practice supporting high-quality, inquiry-based science instruction. Lynn’s legacy lives on in IFI’s incredible staff and programs, in the hundreds of thousands of teachers influenced by the work she founded and led, and in the millions of students taught by those teachers.
Throughout her esteemed career, she contributed to numerous national publications and committees, including the NSF’s “Foundations II: Inquiry, Thoughts, Views and Strategies for the K–5 Classroom,” the National Academy of Science’s committee to develop "Inquiry and the national Science Education Standards" and National Institute for Science Education's Committee on Professional Development. She served as Principal Investigator on many NSF, U.S. Department of Education (US DOE) and private foundation grants. She led the US DOE-funded i3 (Investing in Innovation) project “Integrating ELD and Science: A Professional Development Approach” and the BaySci Science Champions Academy. She also co-founded the Association of Science and Technology Centers' Professional Development Institutes for museum educators, and served on the faculty of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Center for Informal Learning and Schools, a collaboration between the Exploratorium, King's College, London and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Born in Stamford, Conn., in 1946, Lynn grew up in Hobbs and Albuquerque, New Mexico and never lost her love for the amazing beauty and culture of that state. She received her BA in Education from the University of Arizona in 1968 and attended graduate school at UCLA. She is survived by her husband, Robert Semper, of San Francisco, and her sister, Gale Rankin, of Truckee, Calif.
