Today I’m speaking with Dawn Meredith, Professor of Physics at the University of New Hampshire. Dawn has been an integral member of the Physics Education Research community since the late 1990’s and she has been a principal investigator on 8 PER grants. In this honest and down to earth conversation, we discuss not only the ideas and methods that have worked well, but also what hasn’t worked and why. There is just as much for the education community to learn from crash landings as from the soaring successes. But don’t worry; Dawn has a lot of successes to share as well! So settle in as we take a tour through important books, Scale-Up, Modeling physics, rounding cows and the mingling of biologists and physicists, and discover why the heck trees can get so tall.