Eileen Kowalski has been teaching chemistry as a faculty member at West Point since 2001.  In 2024 she received the Dean's Career Award for Distinguished Teaching Excellence. She currently serves as the Department Reviewer of Curriculum Proposals and as a member of the Faculty Development Committee. She is a former Head Department Academic Counselor (2009-2018, 2021-2022) and member of the USMA Steering Committee (2013-2022). She has previously served on the Continuing Intellectual Development Goal Team (2008-2009; Chair 2010-2013), Assessment Steering Committee (2010-2013), and the Corbin Forum mentoring circles (2012-2015).  She was an Officer Representative with the Army Cross Country and Track & Field Teams (2002-2021) and now serves as the Officer in Charge of the choir at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Chapel. Since 2016 she has supported The POGIL ProjectTM with strategic planning and resource development, to include curating submissions to the POGIL Activity Clearinghouse  Kowalski is a faculty member of Gamma Sigma Epsilon Chemistry Honors Society and previously worked for The Upjohn Company and the Tennessee Department of Agriculture.  She earned her bachelor's from Western Michigan University, and her master's and doctoral degrees from Vanderbilt University.

Kowalski is interested in knowing more about how people learn chemistry. She has an ongoing longitudinal study looking at patterns of activity in classrooms. In previous work she looked at whether guided inquiry changes the level or complexity of exam questions and how introducing a multi-step synthesis lab into Organic Chemistry II changed student and faculty perceptions of the course. More recently she has been studying equity of outcomes for various groups in chemistry courses. She is also exploring how teaching equilibrium as a system of equations provides opportunities not available in typical textbook presentations.