Professor Poplin earned her PhD from the University of Texas and is a professor in the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Her work spans K–12 to higher education. Professor Poplin, who began her career as a public school teacher, conducts research largely on the inside of schools and classrooms, and more recently on highly effective teachers in urban poor schools. Funded by the John and Dora Haynes Foundation, she and eight colleagues conducted extensive research from 2005-2009 with 30 highly effective teachers in nine low performing urban K–12 schools in Los Angeles County. Her prior work included a study of Voices Inide the Classroom, funded by the John Kluge Foundation. In 1996, Professor Poplin also worked for two months with Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta to understand why she said their work was “religious work and not social work.” Her book on this experience, Finding Calcutta was published by InterVarsity Press in 2008 and is also available in Korean and Chinese. Poplin’s work in higher education has included administration; at various times, she served as dean and as director of teacher education. Academically, she explores the contemporary intellectual trends dominant in the various academic disciplines—the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. In 2014, she published Is Reality Secular? Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews (InterVarsity Press). In this new book, Poplin examines four major worldviews—naturalism, humanism, pantheism, and Judeo-Christian theism—and explores their implications for human behavior and the evidence for their truth. She is a frequent speaker in Veritas Forums throughout the country.