Benjamin Dickman

Benjamin Dickman

Fellowship Placement: United States Senate
Hometown: New York, NY

Dr. Benjamin Dickman has been a full-time educator for the past twelve years, serving as a mathematics teacher in grades 7 to 12, inclusive, for the previous decade at The Hewitt School, a girls day school in New York City where he has been the K-12 Mathematics Chair since 2024. He has also worked as a teacher-educator, which includes two years as a postdoctoral scholar in mathematics education at Boston University, as well as multiple minicourses cotaught for Math for America Fellows. He has spoken at a variety of conferences, including annual meetings for the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools (ICGS), and the Full STEAM Ahead Conference organized by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA).

After receiving his B.A. in Mathematics from Amherst College, Dr. Dickman spent an academic year in Nanjing, China, as a Fulbright Fellow leveraging his fluency in Mandarin to learn about the Chinese mathematics education system. He returned to the United States and completed a Ph.D. in Mathematics Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, from which he received the 2020 Early Career Alumni Award. Dr. Dickman’s dissertation, supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, connected his primary scholarly interests of mathematical problem posing and mathematical creativity.

Dr. Dickman is focused on supporting fellow STEM educators and enabling students to pursue their mathematical wonders. Relevant experiences include two summers at the Park City Mathematics Institute’s Teacher Leadership Program; two years on the TODOS organization’s Advocacy Committee; and a 2022 Fulbright DAST (Distinguished Award in Short-term Teaching) to work alongside local mathematics educators in a rural part of the Philippines. He continuously designs novel curricular materials and makes them publicly available, which led to his selection as an International Society for Design and Development in Education (ISDDE) Fellow, and he has remained research-active as a classroom teacher. To date, Dr. Dickman has more than 20 peer-reviewed publications across a variety of journals and book chapters, and has supported high school students in researching and publishing on their own interests – ranging from choreography and abstract algebra to “queueing theory” for long lines at Disney to epidemiological SIR-models adapted for mathematizing the viral spread of rumors.