Toni Lefton

Assistant Provost and UHS Executive Director

CONTACT

303-384-2332
Honors and Scholars House
1704 Illinois Street
tlefton@mines.edu

Professor Toni Lefton currently serves as the Assistant Provost for Signature Student Experience in Academic Affairs. In addition, she leads University Honors and Scholars as the Executive Director for Thorson First-Year Honors, Grandey First-Year Honors, the McBride Honors Program in Public Affairs, Undergraduate Research Scholars, Grand Challenges Scholars Program, Teach@Mines, and the office of Nationally Competitive Scholarships.

Professor Lefton joined the Mines faculty in 1999 where she has worked on ethics across the curriculum, integrating arts and humanities into STEM education, and incorporating multidisciplinary lenses and creative expression as a modality for empathy and civic engagement. Professor Lefton’s scholarship and service is devoted to interdisciplinary pedagogy, collaborative teaching, developing signature programs for Mines students, and high impact practices (HIP) in honors education. She received a Daniels Fellowship to integrate ethics in the first-year curriculum and was selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering “Overcoming Challenges to Infusing Ethics.” The results of this collaboration are part of NAE’s Online Ethics Center. Toni is also an active member of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) and the NCHC Faculty Institute which develops experiential programs for students and educators. Professor Lefton is involved in international STEM+, STEAM, and engineering ethics initiatives, researching new methods for HIP, and writing about integrating the arts into an engineer’s toolkit.

Toni received the Outstanding Faculty Award 17 times and was honored with the Board of Trustees Outstanding Faculty Award in 2015. She is the faculty advisor for High Grade, Mines literary arts journal and the Creative Arts Club (CAC). She has served as a faculty mentor for the Vanguard Scholars, as a coach for the Mines Ethics Bowl team, faculty friend for the Visual and Performing Arts Themed Learning Community, Philosophy Club, Creative Writing Club, and Anonymous Right Brains. In her other life, Toni is a published poet and writer. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Narrative, The Crab Orchard Review, Kalliope, The Sun Dog, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Kudzu, Thin Air, Ellipses, on National Public Radio and MS. Magazine, among others. Her first book, Everyday Crimes won the Anhinga Prize and she has been a finalist for a Pushcart and the Emily Dickinson Prize in Poetry.