Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology & Special Education

Kimberly Alberts

Kimberly Alberts (Class of 2023)
Email: alberkm@umich.edu
Pronounce: She/her/hers

Bio:
Kimberly works as an instructional designer for Nexus at the University of Michigan. Her role involves designing online credit and professional development courses, as well as leading faculty development support efforts.

Brian Arnold

Brian Arnold (Class of 2022)
Email: arnol100@msu.edu

Bio:
Brian Arnold is Associate professor in the Sanford College of Education at National University, where he also serves as the Academic Program Director for the Master of Science program in Designing Instructional and Educational Technology. His teaching, learning, and research sits at the intersection of education and the media arts.  

Liz Owens Boltz

Liz Owens Boltz (Class of 2019)
Email: boltzeli@msu.edu
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Assistant Professor and Director of the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program (MAET) at MSU.

Patrick Beymer

Patrick Beymer (Class of 2020)
Email: beymerpk@ucmail.uc.edu
Pronouns: he/him/his

Bio:
Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Cincinnati.

Amy Chapman

Amy Chapman (Class of 2019)
Email: a.b.chapman@gmail.com
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Amy Chapman, Ph.D. is the Director of the Collaborative for Spirituality in Education, a center for research and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. She holds a concurrent appointment as the Director of the Innovating Forward Initiative at Teachers College, which offers seed grants to local community partners to address holistic approaches to mental health concerns. Broadly, Amy researches factors which support or inhibit youth civic participation, spirituality in education, and the ways in which social media can be used to support or thwart community and civic participation. A former public and private school teacher, Dr. Chapman holds three degrees from Boston College and a doctorate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology from Michigan State University. Find more about Dr. Chapman and her work at www.amylchapman.com and on Twitter as @chapmaab.

Missy D. Cosby

Missy Cosby (Class of 2020)
Email: mdcosby@utk.edu
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Following two years of postdoctoral research at MSU and the University of Michigan, Missy is now an assistant professor in Math Education at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville.

Shawn Daley

Shawn Daley (Class of 2022)
Email: shawntdaley@gmail.com
Pronouns: he/him/his

Bio:
I serve as the Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer of George Fox University, the largest private university in the state of Oregon. My responsibilities include running the Data/Analytics team, coordinating Business Development, and stewarding strategic planning and innovation.

Achievement:
Finishing my dissertation felt like a big accomplishment (especially since I had COVID during my defense). Thanks to Cindy Okolo, Troy Mariage, Michael Lachney, and Rand Spiro for the support.

Brittany Dillman

Brittany Dillman (Class of 2021)
Email: dillmanb@msu.edu
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Brittany is the Director of Graduate Certificate Programs with the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program in MSU’s College of Education. She develops curriculum, advises students, and teaches courses to help teachers use strong educational psychology foundations to thoughtfully integrate educational technology into their practice. She works with a dynamic team to create spaces for our learners to explore, create, and share.

Sarah Dysart

Sarah Dysart (Class of 2023)
Email: sarah.a.dysart@gmail.com
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
She serves as senior director for online learning at the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation. I’m responsible for providing strategic direction and support for a portfolio of online and hybrid learning experiences including open, non-credit courses, non-credit pathways to credit, and online and hybrid degree programs. In collaboration with institutional leadership, she provides direction for U-M’s online learning strategy and infrastructure, which provides stackable online learning pathways to support the needs of global lifelong learners. Her team includes approximately 50 individuals, ranging from strategic partnership and program managers, learning experience designers, project managers, and learner support specialists.

Achievement:
They recently launched an initiative partnering with the city of Detroit to offer free non-credit online courses to support upskilling and reskilling opportunities for residents of the city. They also launched an initiative through a partnership with Coursera that integrates extended reality learning experiences into ten U-M massive open online courses (MOOCs). They are evaluating the efficacy and accessibility of these experiences to understand the ways they impact on global learners.

Emily Freer

Emily Freer (Class of 2019)
Email: emily.a.bovee@gmail.com
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Emily works in consumer research for a health system containing 3 acute care hospitals and over 40 health centers. She conducts quantitative and qualitative research studies to explore patients’, staff members’, and health care providers’ wants and needs.

Day Greenberg

Day Greenberg (Class of 2019)
Email: daygr@iu.edu
Pronouns: she/they

Bio:
Learning Sciences Assistant Professor at Indiana University

Sarah (Galvin) Grayvin

Sarah Galvin (Class of 2022)
Email: sgalvin119@gmail.com
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Sarah loves her current work for C3 Industries in Ann Arbor, where she leads the Learning and Development department. Her role includes instructional design, curriculum design, teaching, ed tech tool management and implementation, and company-wide research projects related to training and professional development. As the Learning and Development Specialist, she plans, creates, and manages all educational materials and experiences for employees across modalities.

Spencer Greenhalgh

Spencer Greenhalgh (Class of 2018)
Email: spencer.greenhalgh@uky.edu
Pronouns: he/him/his

Bio:
Spencer has been a faculty member in the University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science since the Fall of 2018. He teaches courses on subjects such as games and learning, web content management, and data science for our Information Communication Technology bachelor’s and master’s programs and our Library and Information Science master’s program. He has become an interdisciplinary researcher who collects “digital traces” data from online platforms to study meaning-making practices within educational, religious, and political groups online. You can learn more about his teaching and scholarship at https://spencergreenhalgh.com/work

Alexandra Lee

Alexandra Lee (Class of 2023)
Email: alexandlee@gmail.com
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Her current job is as a Researcher for LearnPlatform by Instructure. In this role, she works with edtech companies to evaluate the effectiveness of their products for improving student outcomes.

Krystal Lira

Krystal Lira (Class of 2022)
Email: lirakrystal23@gmail.com
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Post Doc for the Research and Equity Scholarship Institute (RES-ISTE) at San Diego State University working with Dr. Felisha Herrera Villarreal. She is studying the experiences of minoritized students at 2-year and 4-year colleges majoring in STEM to best support persistence and retention in those fields.

Sarah Keenan-Lechel

Sarah Keenan-Lechel (Class of 2019)
Email: skeenanlechel@geneseeisd.org
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Sarah is a director with the MiSTEM Network. She works with three counties in Eastern Michigan to support high-quality STEM learning by developing support systems that help districts explore and sustain place/project/problem-based education as a means of achieving equitable learning opportunities within STEM.

Holly Marich

Holly Marich (Class of 2020)
Email: holmarich@gmail.com
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Holly is a Regional Coordinator and Learning Leader for the Northeastern Nevada Regional Professional Development Program, an initiative through the Nevada Department of Education. Through her work with preservice and in-service teachers across Nevada, she advocates for effective technology integration to maximize student learning. She is a proponent of teaching with a process approach that gives learners a voice and choice through authentic experiences.

Swati Mehta

Swati Mehta (Class of 2020)
Email: smehta@csudh.edu
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Dr. Swati Mehta is a critical computer science education scholar who studies culturally responsive and sustainable ways of teaching technology in computer science and STEM disciplines. In her work, Dr. Mehta pushes normative ways of engaging with coding and computational thinking concepts at the K-12 and undergraduate level. Through her work she seeks to create equitable CS learning spaces particular for those who have been historically marginalized.

Postdoctoral Scholar, Snap Inc. Institute of Computing Education
Department of Liberal Studies
California State University, Dominguez-Hills

Sukanya Moudgalya

Sukanya Moudgalya (Class of 2022)

Email: moudgal1@msu.edu

Bio:
Sukanya is primarily interested in active-learning strategies and instructor-facilitated student cooperation in engineering education. She is also interested in peer and social interactions and feedback reliability on social media. Her background is in engineering and educational technology.

Vicky Phun

Vicky Phun (Class of 2023)

Email: phunvick@msu.edu

Bio:
From California to Michigan, Vicky is interested in shaping students’ interest and experience in STEM through designing an engaging and effective learning environment. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and during her undergraduate years, she was involved in understanding the motivating factors of students pursuing STEM. Her connection to teachers and professors inspires her to be an educator and to keep on growing as a student. She is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Physics Education Research Lab (PERL) at MSU.

Joshua Rosenberg

Joshua Rosenberg (Class of 2018)

University of Tennessee
Website

Assistant Professor, STEM Education

Joshua researches and teaches about STEM education, particularly science education and educational technology. He has recently authored or co-authored articles in venues such as the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, the International Journal of Educational Research, and the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education.

Katie Rich

Katie Rich (Class of 2021)
Email: krich@air.org
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Katie joined the EPET program after ten years as a curriculum developer at the University of Chicago. Her work there focused primarily on development and testing of Everyday Mathematics, a PreK-5 mathematics curriculum program. Currently, she is a Senior Researcher at the American Institutes for Research (AIR). She works on a variety of projects related to mathematics and computer science education. Some focus on direct support to schools and districts while others are more research and evaluation oriented. Her role also includes significant attention to collaborative development of proposals for grants and contracts that contribute to an overall organizational goal of supporting equitable education.

Kristy A. Robinson

Kristy Robinson (Class of 2019)
Email: kristy.robinson@mcgill.ca
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Bio:
Kristy is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at McGill University. She does research on achievement motivation and she teaches both statistics and motivation courses.

Anna Sansone

Anna Sansone (Class of 2023)

Email: sansonea@msu.edu

Bio:
Anna is interested in how participation in certain technology-driven activities impacts student motivation and achievement in science classes. Specifically, she would like to learn how connecting with other students in geographically disparate locations enhances student learning over shared but separate experiences. She has a BA in environmental science, an MAT in secondary science teaching, an MS in instructional design and technology, and teaches math, science, and social studies for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS) overseas.

Christopher Seals

Christopher Seals (Class of 2018)
Email: christopher.seals@louisville.edu
Pronouns: he/him/his

Bio:
Christopher is an Assistant Dean of Faculty Affairs and Advancement and an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville’s School of Medicine. His job focuses on faculty: development, recruitment and retention. He also has a research agenda that overlaps with my job focus.

Matthew Schell

Matthew Schell (Class of 2022)
Email: schellma@msu.edu
Pronouns: he/him/his

Bio:
Matthew came to the EPET program after 3 years teaching science at a virtual high school in Michigan. He has a BA in Physiology from the University of Colorado, and a BS in Secondary Education from Western Michigan University. He is currently working as a post-doc for Lisa Linnenbrink-Garcia on a number of NSF and NIH funded grants studying undergraduate students’ motivation, belonging, and identity.

Phil Sands

Phil Sands (Class of 2021)
Email: phil@msu.edu
Pronouns: he/him/his

Bio:
Academic teaching specialist in the Computer Science and Engineering department at Michigan State University. Teaching two introductory CSE courses, one for majors and one for non-majors. Faculty sponsor for Spartan Girls Who Code student organization.

Colin A. Terry

Colin Terry (Class of 2018)
Email: colinterry@gmail.com
Pronouns: he/him/his

Bio:
Colin currently serves as the Assistant Vice President for Student Life at the Colorado School of Mines. In this capacity, he serves as a senior administrator focused on student services with a direct connection to the academic endeavors of our students. These services include disability support, academic advising and support, student scholarships, and student professional development. Additionally, he is a Faculty Fellow in the McBride Honors Program at Mines. As a Fellow, he teaches one honors class annually on the intersection of psychology and technology (think EPET from 20,000 feet).

Brooke Thomas

Brooke Thomas (Class of 2023)

Email: thom1722@msu.edu

Bio:
Brooke is currently an Educational Psychology and Educational Technology (EPET) Ph.D. student at Michigan State University. Her undergraduate degree is in special education, while my master’s is in Educational Leadership. Her teaching experiences have been predominately in low-income, urban educational settings, which has driven my curiosity about what makes for a successful and positive experience in those settings. She is interested in educational research topics that promote a greater experience of justice and equity in the classroom, with a particular interest in studying the impact of social interdependence and cooperative learning on students of colors as it pertains to interest in mathematics.

Keywords:
Belonging, Black girlhood, motivation in middle school, and community-engaged research

Michelle Smith Ware

Michelle Ware (Class of 2023)

Bio:
Michelle Ware joined EPET Hybrid Cohort with 10 years of experience in higher education. Since earning her Masters in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Athletic Counseling in 2004, she has worked in diverse educational settings.

Bret Staudt Willet

Bret Staudt Willet (Class of 2021)
Email: bret.staudt.willet@gmail.com
Pronouns: he/him/his

Bio:
Assistant Professor of Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies at Florida State University. Website https://bretsw.comeducation.

Mengdi (Marissa) Zhu

Mengdi (Marissa) Zhu (Class of 2022)