Dear USC Rossier Faculty, Staff and Students,

I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Gale M. Sinatra will be installed this fall as the Stephen H. Crocker Professor of Education.

A professorship is one of the most coveted honors that can be bestowed upon an individual in the academic community. It is awarded to a scholar who demonstrates the highest level of excellence in leadership and research in his or her area of study.

Dr. Sinatra will be the fourth holder of this endowed professorship, following Drs. Joanna Lemlech, Myron Dembo and Robert Rueda. The professorship was established through an endowment from Stephen H. Crocker, who also created a separate professorship at the USC Thornton School of Music.

Dr. Sinatra has been a professor of psychology and education at USC Rossier since 2012. Like her predecessors in this position, she is one of the top researchers in her field while also serving as an outstanding teacher and adviser. In the spring of 2017, she was one of 22 university faculty members to receive a USC Mentoring Award.

She is an internationally recognized expert on STEM learning and motivation. In particularly she has been a leader in research on climate science education, evolution education, conceptual change learning and the public understanding of science.

Dr. Sinatra has also been a prominent leader in her field through a number of organizations. In August, she will become president of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) educational psychology organization, Division 15, a role that also includes oversight of the prominent journal Educational Psychologist, which she edited from 2005 to 2010. She currently serves as an associate editor of the APA journal Psychological Bulletin, one of the top ranked journals in psychology.

As the Crocker Professor, she will continue on the path that she has already forged at USC Rossier, fostering the next generation of scholars while enhancing the impact of educational psychology on education and public policy.

Dr. Sinatra has edited two books, written dozens of book chapters, co-authored more than 60 scholarly papers and delivered nearly 200 conference presentations in education psychology. She is currently writing a book based on her 2016 article, “Public Understanding of Science: Policy and Educational Implications,” published in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain. The book will explore the psychology of science resistance, doubt and denial.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Sinatra for this important distinction.

Sincerely,

Karen Symms Gallagher, Ph.D.

Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean

USC Rossier School of Education

Waite Phillips Hall

Los Angeles, CA  90089-0031

Asst: hardison@usc.edu

213.740.5756 (office)

213.821.2158 (fax)

Dear USC Rossier Faculty, Staff and Students,

I’m happy to share news of the appointments of Drs. Estela Mara Bensimon and Adrianna Kezar as USC Rossier Dean’s Professors.

Dean’s Professorships are rare distinctions at USC and arise from a nomination from a school’s dean to the provost. Drs. Bensimon and Kezar will be the first Dean’s Professors from USC Rossier.

Only full professors qualify for this honor, and holders of this position have distinguished careers including but not limited to groundbreaking scholarship, teaching and service. Drs. Bensimon and Kezar certainly exceed these requirements.

Estela Mara Bensimon

Dr. Bensimon will be the USC Rossier Dean’s Professor in Educational Equity, befitting her commitment throughout her career to achieving educational equity. She has demonstrated impact on universities and community colleges, as well as on leaders and policymakers, through her scholarship and through the creation and impact of the Center for Urban Education (CUE), which she founded in 1999.

In the last 10 years, Dr. Bensimon has earned the Social Justice Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA); the Research Achievement Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE); the USC Mellon Award for Mentoring; and the Research/Teaching Award for Outstanding Latino/a Faculty in Higher Education from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education.

She became an AERA Fellow in 2011 and was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2017. Last month she was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the Education Commission of the States.

Her work on equity has appeared in numerous journals, including Educational Policy and Review of Higher Education. Currently, Dr. Bensimon is the Co-PI on three grants focusing on equity-minded competence in instruction and assessment.

CUE is our second oldest research center at USC Rossier. Its impact on national and state practices in higher education is due largely to her vision and leadership. Both the Equity Scorecard and the tireless work she and her colleagues at CUE perform bring about change on campuses both for individual faculty and collectively at the institutional level.

Adrianna Kezar

Dr. Kezar will be the USC Rossier Dean’s Professor in Higher Education Leadership. She is the co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education and also directs the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success.

She is a national expert on change, governance and leadership in higher education, and her research agenda explores the change process in higher education institutions and the role of leadership in creating change. She regularly presents her scholarship at conferences, seminars and workshops to help higher education leaders tackle key challenges such as shared governance, organizational learning and changing demographics and diversity.

Dr. Kezar has published 18 books and monographs, over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and over 100 book chapters and reports. She has also acquired approximately $13 million dollars in grant funding.

In 2015, she was recognized as an AERA Fellow, and in 2017 she received the Research Achievement Award from ASHE, given to scholars whose “published work advances understanding of higher education in a significant way.”

Please join me in congratulating Estela and Adrianna for these well-deserved honors. Their three-year terms in these positions will begin in the 2018–19 academic year. Each will deliver a Dean’s Professorship Lecture followed by a luncheon this fall.

Fight On!

Sincerely,

Karen Symms Gallagher, Ph.D.

Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean

USC Rossier School of Education

Waite Phillips Hall

Los Angeles, CA  90089-0031

Asst: hardison@usc.edu

213.740.5756 (office)

213.821.2158 (fax)

Dear USC Rossier Faculty, Staff and Students,

I am pleased to announce that, after a national search, we have extended an offer to Adam Kho to fill our tenure-track faculty position in K–12 Education Policy and Leadership. Adam has accepted and will begin as an assistant professor in August 2018.

Adam is currently completing his PhD in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, with a specialty in K-12 Education Policy Studies and a minor in Quantitative Methods.

Prior to Vanderbilt, Adam received his bachelor’s degree in Chemical-Biological Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a minor in Biology. He then joined Teach for America, which returned him to his hometown in Atlanta, where he taught high school mathematics for three years and served subsequently as an instructional coach for two years. During that time, he also completed his master’s degree in Secondary Mathematics Education at Georgia State University.

Adam’s stint in a low-performing, Title I turnaround school has shaped his research interests, which include education policies and evaluation of programs serving traditionally disadvantaged students, with a focus on school reform. His current research includes an evaluation of Tennessee’s portfolio model for school turnaround, a series of studies evaluating the effects of charter schools on student achievement and on the sorting of students both academically and demographically, and the impact of the Community Eligibility Provision on various student outcomes in Tennessee.

I want to thank Associate Deans Larry Picus and Darline Robles and the members of our search committee: Tricia Burch, Mike Chung, Shira Korn (PhD student), Tatiana Melguizo, Erika Patall, Morgan Polikoff and David Quinn. They identified a very strong pool of candidates whose research interests aligned with our mission to advance educational equity.

Please join me in welcoming Adam to the USC Rossier Family!

Fight On!

Sincerely,

Karen Symms Gallagher, Ph.D.

Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean

USC Rossier School of Education

Waite Phillips Hall

Los Angeles, CA  90089-0031

Asst: hardison@usc.edu

213.740.5756 (office)

213.821.2158 (fax)