Valerie Ross is the founding director (2003) of the University of Pennsylvania's Critical Writing Program, an independent writing in the disciplines program organized around evidence-driven teaching and discipline-specific transferable writing instruction. Ross's current research interests include an NSF-funded project on undergraduate peer review in STEM courses; writing ecologies; cognitive and non-cognitive elements of writing knowledge transfer; human and machine learning; and all of these informed by an abiding professional and personal interest in film studies, particularly the history of American auteurs.