The College of Education welcomes 12 new faculty members this academic year across all four departments. Here is a brief introduction of them including their research interests and the focus of their recent work.
Melanie COOPER, Lappan-Phillips Professor of Science Education
Department of Teacher Education, Department of Chemistry
PhD, University of Manchester
Melanie Cooper is the first Lappan-Phillips Professor of Science Education, and is jointly-appointed to the College of Education and the College of Natural Science. Cooper’s research focuses on evidence-based approaches to improving chemistry education. One of the prime outcomes of this research is the development and assessment of evidence-driven, research-validated curricula.
Joshua COWEN, Associate Professor
Department of Teacher Education, Education Policy Center
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Joshua Cowen’s current research focuses on teacher quality, student and teacher mobility, program evaluation and education policy. His work has been published in multiple scholarly journals, and he is a member of the Editorial Board at Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Cowen previously taught public policy at the University of Kentucky.
Marisa FISHER, Assistant Professor
Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education
PhD, Vanderbilt University
Marisa Fisher is an assistant professor of special education in the areas of Autism Spectrum Disorders and Applied Behavior Analysis. Her primary research focus is on understanding and decreasing social vulnerability among individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She is specifically interested in measuring the various types of victimization experienced by individuals with disabilities and on designing interventions to decrease vulnerability. She has studied victimization in the form of child abuse, bullying, stranger danger and exploitation across the lifespan. She has then used the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis and single-subject research methods to design interventions to teach self-protection to individuals with disabilities.
Mei-Hua LEE, Assistant Professor
Department of Kinesiology
PhD, Pennsylvania State University
Mei-Hua Lee’s research focus is in the area of motor development throughout the lifespan, specifically in the context of how infants and young children learn to interact with the surrounding environment. She predominantly studies reaching and grasping and how new behaviors and movement patterns emerge out of previous ones. Her research integrates the study of both perception and action by using kinematic analysis, biofeedback and qualitative analysis. Her overall research goal is to understand the acquisition of fundamental motor skills and explore how these findings integrate with theories of motor learning and rehabilitation.
Chin-Hsi LIN, Assistant Professor
Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education
PhD, University of California, Irvine
Chin-Hsi Lin is as assistant professor of technology and second language education. His primary research interest is emerging technologies in language education, especially new forms of social media. His investigates the process and outcome of social learning and authentic communications on a social network site developed for language learning. His secondary research interest is psychology of reading, particularly the reading development of Chinese language learners. He examines how first language and orthographic co-occurrence in second language affects the reading development of Chinese learners.
Lisa LINNENBRINK-GARCIA, Associate Professor
Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education (CEPSE)
PhD, University of Michigan
Lisa Linnenbrink-Garcia is an associate professor in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education (CEPSE). Linnenbrink-Garcia’s research focuses on the development of achievement motivation in school settings and the interplay among motivation, emotions and learning, especially in science and mathematics.
Patricia MARIN, Assistant Professor
Department of Educational Administration
PhD, University of Maryland
Patricia Marin is an assistant professor of Higher, Adult and Lifelong Education. Her research interests focus on higher education policy and issues of inclusion and equity for underrepresented students. In particular, her work examines issues of diversity, affirmative action and college access. In her current work, she is studying the changing nature of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs).
Rajiv RANGANATHAN, Assistant Professor
Department of Kinesiology
PhD, Pennsylvania State University
Rajiv Ranganathan’s research interests are in the area of motor learning and biomechanics. He is particularly interested in how humans produce skilled and coordinated movement, and how this ability is altered in the context of development, aging and movement disorders. He uses a combination of both experimental techniques—such as motion capture, robotics and virtual reality—as well as biomechanical modeling and computer simulations to understand the mechanisms underlying the control of human movement. The overarching goal of his research is to develop novel training paradigms to facilitate motor skill learning and the rehabilitation of movement disorders.
David STROUPE, Assistant Professor
Department of Teacher Education
PhD, University of Washington
David Stroupe has three overlapping areas of research interests. First, he studies the teaching profession, teacher preparation and teacher educators through the lens of ambitious practice. Second, he considers how to better support beginning teachers in and across contexts in which they learn from practice. Third, he uses lenses from Science, Technology and Society (STS) and the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) to frame classrooms as epistemic communities, focusing on how teachers and students negotiate power, knowledge and epistemic agency. Stroupe has a background in biology and taught secondary life science for four years.
Terah VENZANT CHAMBERS, Associate Professor
Department of Educational Administration
PhD, University of Illinois
Terah Venzant Chambers is an associate professor of K-12 administration. Her research interests include post-Brown K-12 education policy and urban education/urban education leadership. Specifically, she is interested in the ways within-school segregative policies influence African American students’ academic achievement and school engagement, as well as the price of school success for high-achieving students of color (racial opportunity cost). She has previously served as a Congressional Fellow with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (CBCF) with placements in the Office of Rep. Diane E. Watson (retired) and the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education.
John T. YUN, Associate Professor
Department of Educational Administration
EdD, Harvard University
John T. Yun has areas of expertise in diverse learners and educational equity, educational policy, assessment, and measurement and evaluation. His research focuses on issues of equity in education, specifically patterns of school segregation; the effect of poverty and opportunity on educational outcomes; the educative/counter-educative impacts of high-stakes testing; and the power of evaluation to impact policy and practice.
Dongbo ZHANG, Assistant Professor
Department of Teacher Education
PhD, Carnegie Mellon University
Dongbo Zhang is an assistant professor of second language education. He is interested in second language reading, bilingual children’s literacy acquisition, and second language acquisition and pedagogy. His research regards language and literacy acquisition as a cognitive endeavor situated in social context, and highlights the development of learner-internal competencies which necessitates learner-external support. Broadly, his research addresses two questions: What factors influence the development of language and literacy skills in an additional language? How can classroom pedagogical practices meet the diverse needs of learners in their second language or bilingual/biliteracy learning?
FACULTY PROMOTIONS
To Professor:
John Carlson
School Psychology
Lynn Fendler
Teacher Education
To Associate Professor:
Alicia Alonzo
Teacher Education
Amita Chudgar
Educational Administration and Policy
Summer Ferreri
Special Education
Kyle Greenwalt
Teacher Education and Policy
Rebecca Jacobsen
Teacher Education and Policy
Cary Roseth
Educational Psychology