CEHD FACULTY AWARDS
The College of Education & Human Development’s annual faculty awards celebrate excellence in three areas: teaching, service to the profession and community, and research and scholarship. Awardees have published extensively, mentored numerous educators and peers, secured significant grant funding, and represented Georgia State University and the College of Education & Human Development in school systems, community organizations and in their disciplines.
Dr. Jeff Ashby
Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award for Graduate Teaching
Dr. Jeff Ashby is the 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award for Graduate Teaching, which recognizes a full-time faculty member in the college for outstanding achievement in the area of graduate teaching.
Dr. Ashby is a professor in the Department of Counseling and Psychological Services. He received his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Pennsylvania State University, and is a licensed psychologist (GA 002265) and a Diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP #5351). He does research in the areas of stress and trauma and cognitive structures (e.g., perfectionism). His additional interests include play therapy and adventure/experiential modalities of counseling. Dr. Ashby serves as co-director of the College of Education & Human Development’s Ken Matheny Center for the Study of Stress, Trauma and Resilience.
Dr. Rhina Fernandes Williams
Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching
Dr. Rhina Fernandes Williams is the 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching, which recognizes a full-time faculty member in the college for outstanding achievement in the area of undergraduate teaching.
Dr. Fernandes Williams is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education and serves as co-director of the Center for Equity and Justice in Teacher Education. Her expertise and scholarship is in teacher development in critical and culturally responsive pedagogy, urban education and social justice education. Her belief in the power of critically conscious teachers drives her scholarship and work with in-service and pre-service educators in graduate and undergraduate programs. Dr. Fernandes Williams is a university-based member of the Collaboration and Reflection to Enhance Atlanta Teacher Effectiveness teacher residency program, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. She has collaborated on starting an innovative educational specialist program; served as co-coordinator for the doctor of education in curriculum and instruction program; created numerous graduate and undergraduate courses; planned and facilitated workshops and retreats for educators in local and global communities; and taught elementary school for several years. She is an affiliate faculty in the Alonzo A. Crim Center for Urban Educational Excellence, where she connects and collaborates with others who are committed to providing all children with access to a high-quality education.
Dr. Hongli Li
Outstanding Faculty Research Award
Dr. Hongli Li is the 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Research Award, which recognizes a full-time faculty member in the college for outstanding achievement in the area of scholarship.
Dr. Li is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies. She graduated from the Pennsylvania State University with a Ph.D. in educational psychology specializing in educational measurement. Her primary research areas are applied measurement and quantitative methods in education. In particular, she is interested in measurement validity, and how testing influences teaching and learning (cognitive diagnostic modeling and formative assessment). Her most recent work includes peer assessment and measurement issues in the online learning environment. Dr. Li’s articles have appeared in refereed journals such as Applied Psychological Measurement, Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, Applied Measurement in Education, Educational Assessment, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, Educational Research and Evaluation, Language Testing and Language Assessment Quarterly. Her research is currently supported by the Spencer Foundation, among other sources. She is also a co-investigator for the Center for the Study of Adult Literacy project. At Georgia State University, Dr. Li teaches structural equation modeling, item response theory, hierarchical linear modeling, and other measurement and quantitative methods courses.
Dr. Kenneth Rice
Outstanding Faculty Research Mentoring Award
Dr. Kenneth Rice is the 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Research Mentoring Award, which recognizes a full-time faculty member who fulfills in an exemplary way the college’s commitment to providing mentoring in the conduct of research to faculty colleagues and doctoral students.
Dr. Rice holds the Ken and Mary Matheny Endowed Professorship in the Department of Counseling and Psychological Services and co-directs the college’s Ken Matheny Center for the Study of Stress, Trauma, and Resilience. Much of his research centers on stress and resilience. He has conducted studies addressing the ways in which personal characteristics (such as perfectionism), emotion regulation, and relational factors affect a variety of health, mental health, work, academic and treatment-related processes and outcomes. He has conducted studies aimed at developing or evaluating measures that can be used in schools, universities and health-related settings. Dr. Rice’s studies often focus on diverse and underrepresented groups and topics, such as sociodemographic factors that moderate stress associated with COVID-19, stress and coping among adult learners in literacy programs, psychosocial adjustment of international students in the U.S., personal and contextual factors that contribute to STEM student retention and academic performance, and psychometric comparisons of measures used in different countries. His research has been published in major journals, including the Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Personality Assessment, School Psychology and Psychotherapy. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association.
Dr. Katie Kurumada
Outstanding Faculty Service to the Community Award
Dr. Katie Kurumada is the 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Service to the Community Award, which recognizes a full-time faculty member who fulfills in an exemplary way the college’s commitment to service and has consistently demonstrated exemplary service to the community and Georgia State University.
Dr. Kurumada is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education and the associate project director of Reading Recovery and Pathways to Literacy. She has more than 15 years of experience preparing teachers of emerging bilingual students. She has served in leadership roles for the Georgia Association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, including chairing the Grants and Awards Committee, where she led the effort to award over $10,000 annually to ESOL educators across the country. Dr. Kurumada has also served on Georgia State University’s Undergraduate Research Conference Committee, the University Senate and Reading Recovery’s National Association of Trainers Group (NATG). In her first year in NATG, she served on the Teaching and Professional Development Committee, which revised the testing booklets used in the Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement.
Dr. Jason Braasch
Outstanding Faculty Service to the Profession Award
Dr. Jason Braasch is the 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Service to the Profession Award, which recognizes a full-time faculty member who fulfills in an exemplary way the college’s commitment to service and has consistently demonstrated exemplary service to their profession at a national level.
Dr. Braasch is an associate professor in the Department of Learning Sciences and an affiliate of the college’s Adult Literacy Research Center. His research examines cognitive processes that underlie the evaluation of content and source information when reading texts found on the Internet, and the ways individual differences encourage (or discourage) successful learning. He has also developed and implemented classroom-based interventions to improve strategies for thinking critically about information on the Internet. Dr. Braasch has published extensively on these topics and received external funding to support his research, including grants from the Spencer Foundation and Facebook.
Dr. G. Sue Kasun
Innovation in International Education Faculty Award
Dr. G. Sue Kasun is the 2022 recipient of the Innovation in International Education Faculty Award, which recognizes a full-time faculty member in the college for their outstanding achievement in international education.
Dr. Kasun is an associate professor of language education in the Department of Middle and Secondary Education and the director of the college’s Center for Transnational and Multilingual Education. She has extensively researched with Mexican-origin populations for over two decades. Her work is multi-sited, situated in sending and receiving communities spanning the U.S.-Mexican border, highlighting the trans-nationalism of many immigrant communities. Her co-edited book, “Applying Anzalduan Frameworks to Understand Transnational Youth Identities: Bridging Culture, Language and Schooling at the U.S.-Mexican Border,” was published this year by Routledge. She has focused on Mexican-origin populations’ ways of knowing and intersections with language education and how Mexican origin youth have performed in schools, including through a Fulbright Award to Mexico during the 2017-2018 school year. Her research is published in many education journals, including Teachers College Record, Anthropology and Education Quarterly and TESOL Quarterly. Dr. Kasun has just completed a pilot study about native science curriculum she co-developed with Indigenous colleagues in Mexico and submitted a National Science Foundation proposal based on this work in order to expand the curriculum to the national level.
Dr. Daniel Conine
Amy R. Lederberg Award for Outstanding Research in Educational Psychology
Dr. Daniel Conine is the 2022 recipient of the Amy R. Lederberg Award for Outstanding Research in Educational Psychology. Established by Dr. Carol Springer Sargent to honor her dissertation chair, Dr. Amy R. Lederberg, this award is given to a new faculty member to support the development of their research agenda and recognize research-related accomplishments.
Dr. Conine is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst – Doctoral and an assistant professor in the Department of Learning Sciences. He serves as program coordinator for the college’s applied behavior analysis master’s program. He conducts research on behavior-analytic interventions for individuals with autism, with an emphasis on skill acquisition and verbal behavior. His research focuses on improving the efficiency of intervention by targeting behavioral cusps, incorporating preference and reinforcer assessments, and studying strategies that promote generalization, maintenance and emergent learning. Dr. Conine received his doctorate and master’s degrees in psychology from the University of Florida and his bachelor’s degree from Denison University. He has worked in a variety of clinical and research contexts throughout his career, providing behavior-analytic services to children and their families, including early intervention, the treatment of severe problem behavior and caregiver training. Dr. Conine has published research in such journals as the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Behavior Analysis in Practice, the Journal of Behavioral Education and The Analysis of Verbal Behavior.