Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment

Edmund Gordon is the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology, Emeritus at Yale University, Richard March Hoe Professor, Emeritus of Psychology and Education, at Teachers College, Columbia University and Director Emeritus of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME) at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is also the Senior Scholar in Residence at the SUNY Rockland Community College. Professor Gordon’s distinguished career spans professional practice, scholarly life as a minister, clinical and counseling psychologist, research scientist, author, editor, and professor. He has held appointments at several of the nation’s leading universities including Howard, Yeshiva, Columbia, City University of New York, and Yale. Additionally, Gordon has served as visiting professor at City College of New York and Harvard University. From July 2000 until August, 2001, he was Vice President for Academic Affairs and Interim Dean of Faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University. Gordon has been recognized as a preeminent member of his discipline. He is an elected Fellow of various prestigious associations including the American Psychological Association, American Society of Psychological Science, the American Association for Orthopsychiatry and Fellow and Life Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1979 he was elected member of the National Academy of Education. Among his most recent honors is the Edmund W. Gordon Chair for Policy Evaluation and Research” created by the Educational Testing Service to recognize his lasting contributions to developments in education including Head Start, compensatory education, school desegregation, and supplementary education. In 2005 Columbia University named its campus in Harlem, N. Y. the Edmund W. Gordon Campus of Teachers College, Columbia University. In 2011-2013, Gordon served as the organizer and chair of the Gordon Commission in the Future of Assessment in Education. Gordon has been named one of America’s most prolific and thoughtful scholars. He is the author of more than 200 articles and 18 books.

Dr. Keena Arbuthnot received a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializing in Psychometrics/Educational Measurement, Applied Statistics, and Program Evaluation. She holds an MEd in Educational Psychology and a BS in Mathematics. In 2005, Dr. Arbuthnot became a Lecturer on Education and a Post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is currently the Special Advisor to the President and the Joan Pender McManus Distinguished Professor of Education at Louisiana State University. Dr. Arbuthnot conducts research in the field of education. She has published many articles, has authored two books: Filling in the Blanks: Understanding the Black-White Achievement Gap and Global Perspective on Educational Testing: Examining Fairness, High-Stakes, and Policy Reform. She is recognized nationally and internationally for her research on standardized testing and assessments, test fairness issues, STEM education and achievement, and culturally responsive assessment. Dr. Arbuthnot started her career as a high school mathematics teacher and acknowledges that her experiences in the classroom still has a significant impact on her research and teaching.

Tamara Bertrand Jones, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Higher Education and Associate Director for the Center for Postsecondary Success at Florida State University (FSU). She uses qualitative methods and critical and feminist theories to examine the sociocultural contexts that influence education and professional experiences of underrepresented populations, particularly Black women, in academia. Her previous work as a higher education administrator and program evaluator also contribute to her research interests in culturally responsive assessment and evaluation. Her work has broad implications for recruitment, retention, advancement, and professional development of faculty and doctoral students. She is a founder and past president of Sisters of the Academy Institute, an international organization that promotes collaborative scholarship and networking among Black women in academia. In the spirit of collaborative scholarship, she and fellow scholars, wrote Pathways to Higher Education for African American Women (Stylus Publishing) and Cultivating Leader Identity and Capacity in Students from Diverse Backgrounds (Jossey-Bass) and the forthcoming Black Sisterhoods: Black Womyn’s Representations of Sisterhood across the Diaspora (Demeter Press). She also co-developed the Research BootCamp, a professional development program for emerging scholars to assist with transition to academia for early career faculty, and dissertation completion for advanced doctoral students. Dr. Bertrand Jones attended the University of Texas at Austin for her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism, FSU for a Master’s degree in Higher Education Master’s, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Research and Evaluation Methods also from FSU.

Katrina L. Bledsoe, Ph.D., is principal of Global Equity Diversity, Accessibility, and Inclusion at Abt Associates, the Washington DC metropolitan area, and senior advisor to Strategic Learning Partner for Innovation (SLP4i). She is a trained evaluator, mixed methodologist, and social psychologist with evaluation experience in both U.S. and international settings. Dr. Bledsoe’s evaluation work has focused on community-based social services, health and education evaluation and programming, mixed methodology and methods, theory-driven evaluation, culturally responsive and equity-focused approaches, and topics in applied social psychology. In her 25-year career, Dr. Bledsoe has served as principal investigator, co-principal investigator, or project director on a variety of projects, and has received grants and contracts for programs in mental and physical health, the arts, economic sustainability, education, and international development. She has served as a consultant to federal, state, and local government agencies such as the National Science Foundation and to schools, universities, foundations, and community-based organizations. At Abt Associates, she is responsible for developing Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) strategies that center on culturally responsive research and evaluation approaches, theory-driven evaluation, and organizational learning. As Principal of Global EDI she serves as a thought leader on EDI both within and outside the organization, as it pertains to research and evaluation. Dr. Bledsoe currently serves as the Executive Board Chairperson for Efficacy Methodology Research Institute, in Kampala Uganda, East Africa, a think tank spanning the continent. She is a member of the American Evaluation Association, the Washington Evaluators, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Dr. Bledsoe’s work has been published in journals such as Evaluation Matters—He Take Tō Te Aromatawai, the American Journal of Evaluation, New Directions in Evaluation, Families in Society, and in edited volumes such Qualitative Inquiry in the Practice of Evaluation, Continuing the Journey to Reposition Culture and Cultural Context in Evaluation Theory and Practice, and the International Handbook of Urban Education.

Nicole/ Waapalaneexhweet Bowman Lunaape/Mohican), PhD, is a traditional Ndulunaapeewi Kwe Lunaape Woman) and a traditional community member and citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation in Wisconsin, USA (www.mohican.com). She is a curious, creative, and courageous innovator whose academic lodge sits at the place Where traditional knowledge and Tribal sovereignty intersect with evaluation, policy, and research. She is the Founder/President of Bowman Performance Consulting (www.bpcwi.com) and an Associate Scientist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (https://wcer.wisc.edu/About/Staff/3229). Dr. Bowman holds knowledge and experience in multi-jurisdictional and complexity systems (Nation to Nation and culturally responsive and Indigenous research, policy, and evaluation. She is an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation and co-founder of Roots and Relations, a permanent section in the journal. Dr. Bowman is also the recipient of the American Evaluation Association's 2018 Robert Ingle Service Award (the youngest and first Indigenous awardee) and serves on numerous global evaluation, Indigenous, and educational journal review and advisor boards. Dr. Bowman has served for more than twenty-fire rears in elected leadership position of AEA's Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation Topical Interest Group, and is a Global Advisory Member of EvalIndigenous (2015-present), Blue Marble Evaluation (2018 - present), the Board of the International Evaluation Academr (2021 - present), and AEA's International Work Group (2017-2022). Since 2016, Dr. Bowman has been an Affiliate Faculty Researcher at the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign and continues to serve at the request of national, international, philanthropic, professional, and Tribal organizations and Tribal/First Nations as a collaborative, passionate, and effective thought partner and community and scholarly contributor.

Martin Brown is Head of School of Policy and Practice at the Institute of Education, Dublin City University (DCU) and co-director at EQI – The Centre for Evaluation Quality and Inspection, also based at DCU. He is an appointed Expert Evaluator to the European Commission and advisor to the Teaching Council of Ireland. He is the Project coordinator and co-principal investigator for the following national and transnational funded research projects: Supporting Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Leadership in Schools (CRELiS); Inter-Cultural Community Evaluation and Planning (ICCEP); Repurposing Education through Blended Learning (REBEL); Northern Ireland Shaped Professional Learning Network (NISPN); Cultural Responsivity in Teacher Education- Research in Action (CRiTERiA).Research interests include: Accountability and Evaluation in Education; Comparative Education Studies; Leadership; Educational Policy; Professional Learning Networks.

Suzanne Callahan founded Callahan Consulting for the Arts in 1996 to help artists, arts organizations, and funders realize their vision through services that include planning, resource development, evaluation, research, and philanthropic counsel. She brings over 30 years’ experience as a national funder, for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Dance/USA, and other organizations. In 2018-2020, the firm led the design and management of Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists, a $1.9 million program that, with the support of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, supports individual dance artists who are working to address social change in communities. Her firm has conducted studies for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Chicago Community Trust and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evaluations conducted by her firm have focused on the creative process and audience engagement, as well as the intersection of arts with social justice, service delivery, education, philanthropy and healthcare. Callahan is an author and frequent lecturer in arts evaluation at national and regional conferences. Her book Singing Our Praises: Case Studies in the Art of Evaluation, published by the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, was awarded Outstanding Publication of the Year from the American Evaluation Association (AEA). Her evaluation writings have been published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, as well as the journals of national arts service organizations. She has instructed for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, Society for Arts in Healthcare, South Arts, and Arts Midwest. She has been a guest lecturer at numerous universities and an adjunct professor at GWU. She conceived of and produced the Dance/USA book Dance from the Campus to the Real World (and Back Again): A Resource Guide for Artists, Faculty and Students. Both of her books are used as college texts. Callahan has served as panelist or site visitor for numerous foundations and associations and on advisory committees for the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the Society for Arts in Healthcare and Dance Metro DC. She is a member of the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers, Certified Fund Raisers International, and other organizations in the arts and evaluation fields. At the NEA she received a Distinguished Service Award for her leadership as Chair to the agency's AIDS Working Group and for her efforts to address the issues of AIDS and health insurance for artists. A former dance teacher, Callahan holds an M.A. in Dance Education and a Certificate in Fundraising from George Washington University, where she also studied evaluation and anthropology, and a BA from Northwestern University. She has studied evaluation at numerous organizations and with some of the foremost experts in the field, including Michael Quinn Patton and Richard Krueger, and trained in facilitating communities of practice with Etienne Wenger. Training in racial equity comes from many artists, activists, mentors, and methods, including the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), and Equity Quotient.

Olatokunbo (Toks) S. Fashola (Ph.D.) received her Ph.D. in Educational psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995, and have spent her career as a policy researcher, and a program evaluator. Currently, she holds a Research Professor position American University in Washington, D.C. She serves as the faculty coordinator for the Dual Enrollment program, and the Early Childhood Education accreditation specialist for the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). She is also a Faculty Associate for the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA). Over the years, her research has addressed risk factors, protective factors, buffers, assets and resiliency, with a special emphasis on English Language Learners, African American Males, school reform programs and models, low-income students in grades Pre-PRE-K-12, opportunities beyond the school hours, and early childhood education. She has used rigorous applied research designs and methods such as synthetic analyses and systematic reviews and randomized field trials to analyze and evaluate the effects of programs that are designed to serve as protective factors for students in grades PRE-K-12. She has also participated in additional types of research studies and projects, which have included pilot studies, and evaluations of projects aimed at improving the opportunities of underrepresented minorities, individuals with disabilities, and English language learning. Tok's work over the past thirteen years has addressed the effectiveness of programs for African American males, English Language Learners (ELLS), and low-income students, particularly recipients of Titles I-IV services. Her previous work has also included being the Task Leader for the creation of expert papers for the National Center for Special education Research, exploring topics such as single case studies, Regression Discontinuity Designs (RDDs), Interrupted Time Series, and Randomize Field Trials (RFTs). Some current research manuscripts appear in the Journal of Education of Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), Phi Delta Kappan, Urban Education, and the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ), Peabody Journal of Education, and Journal of Negro Education. Tok's current work addresses equitable college access, and persistence in STEM among traditionally excluded and underrepresented students in IHEs and in STEM. For STEM work, she explores Culturally Responsive research and implementation methods used to broaden access to STEM pipelines. In her Dual Enrollment work, she explores systems in higher education, and how members of this targeted population navigate the systems and how the systems themselves may change in order to provide better post-secondary opportunities and avenues success to students.

Henry T. Frierson is Professor of Educational Research and Evaluation Methodology in the College of Education at the University of Florida. From 2007 to 2021, he was the Associate Vice President and Dean of the Graduate School and. Prior to the University of Florida, he was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1996, he began teaching a program evaluation graduate course and taught the course each semester until 2007. During that time, he mentored many students in a number of aspects of program evaluation; a number became professional evaluators and others taught graduate courses in program evaluation. He became a primary proponent of cultural responsiveness in program evaluation and vigorously advocates culturally responsive evaluation approaches in all program evaluation projects and studies. Early on, he has written articles and chapters related to program evaluation. In1994, he and Stafford Hood published the edited volume, Beyond the Dream: Meaningful Program Evaluation and Assessment to Achieve Equal Opportunities for Minorities at Predominantly White Universities. To kick-off the focus on culturally responsive evaluation, 2002, he along with Hood and Gerunda Hughes wrote the chapter, “Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Strategies for Addressing it” in the NSF published The User-Friendly Evaluation Handbook. Three years later, with Hood and Rodney Hopson, he published the edited volume, The Role of Culture and Cultural Context: A Mandate for Inclusion, the Discovery of Truth and Understanding in Evaluative Theory and Practice. Later, the three published the edited volume, Continuing the Journey to Reposition Culture and Cultural Context in Evaluation Theory and Practice, though it is noted that Frierson does not hold to evaluation theories but evaluation approaches. Most recently, he, Hood, Hopson, and Keena Arthbuthnot edited The Importance of Race-Based Culturally Responsive Educational Inquiry in Research, Evaluation and Assessment.

Leslie Goodyear, PhD, has over 20 years of experience evaluating educational projects and programs at local, regional, national, and international levels. She has conducted evaluations and evaluation capacity building in formal and informal educational settings, afterschool, youth civic engagement, HIV prevention, youth development, and human services programs, with a recent focus on STEM educational programs in informal settings. As Distinguished Scholar/Principal Evaluation Director at EDC, she is the lead author on a Wallace Foundation-funded report on ensuring quality in summer learning, has led a multi-year evaluation of the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing–Alliances Program, the Statewide Evaluation of the Illinois 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program, and evaluation of an equity initiative in the Omaha Public School District, and led an evaluation and learning partnership focused on advancing racial equity in Chicago. From 2009 to 2012, she took a leave from EDC to serve as a Program Officer at the National Science Foundation, where she administered grants in the programs of the Division of Research on Learning, including ITEST, Informal Science Education, Promoting Research and Innovation in Methodologies for Evaluation, and CAREER; supervised evaluation and research contracts; and developed directorate and division level evaluation policy. All the projects and programs that Leslie evaluates are focused on racial equity, DEIA, and broadening participation of underrepresented groups, whether that be through exciting, hands-on STEM experiences; safe, stimulating afterschool learning spaces; or new approaches to recruiting and retaining women, people of color and people with disabilities in computer science. Dr. Goodyear is invested in ensuring that evaluation approaches and techniques are responsive to the culture and context of programs and they people they serve. Goodyear has been the Associate Editor of the American Journal of Evaluation; lead editor of Qualitative Inquiry in Evaluation: From Theory to Practice (2014); author of the chapter “Building a Community of Evaluation Practice Within a Multisite Program;” editor of a special issue on ethics in evaluation in Evaluation and Program Planning; and coauthor of “The Role of Culture and Cultural Context in Evaluation,” among other publications. Leslie received a Masters and PhD in program evaluation from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science from Macalester College.

Dr. Andrea Guerrero- Guajardo is an independent evaluation consultant and has worked in hospital administration and higher education with particular expertise in the areas of organizational leadership, strategic planning, and nonprofit operations. Her research approach is firmly entrenched in the principles of community organizing and participatory decision making with the goal of developing local capacity and increasing access to health and other services for uninsured adults and children and particularly in among Latino communities. Her community-based work is focused on social determinants of health and community responsive evaluation that addresses disparities caused by social, political, and economic inequities within historically oppressed and marginalized populations. Dr. Guerrero-Guajardo has worked with stakeholders at the local, state, and national levels to develop prudent public policy, as well as promote population health and community wellness, especially among marginalized and oppressed populations. She is an experienced trainer in these topics and was recognized by the Obama White House for her expertise and contributions to best practices for coalition building and community collaboration. Dr. Guerrero-Guajardo holds a bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of St. Thomas in Houston, a Master of Public Health from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and a PhD in Education from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.

Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology at Northern Arizona University. During a forty plus-year professional career in higher education, Dr. Hall has served in four successive appointments, as an academic dean, comprised of positions at Florida Atlantic University, University of California-Irvine, University of Maryland at College Park, and most recently Northern Arizona University (NAU). At NAU, Dr. Hall served as Dean of the College of Education and additionally was the principal investigator on two five-year US Office of Education GEAR UP grants providing dropout prevention programs and services to thousands of middle and high school students throughout Arizona. Returning to full-time faculty life at NAU in 2002, Dr. Hall melded teaching and scholarship in Educational Psychology with responsibility as co-principal investigator on five-years of National Science Foundation support for the Relevance of Culture in Evaluation Institute. Growing out of the RCEI grant, Dr. Hall began a continuing appointment as a founding affiliated faculty in the Center for Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) at the University of Illinois. As an external reviewer, Dr. Hall has served on numerous review panels and Committee of Visitors for the National Science Foundation EHR Division including an invited expert panel on the future of evaluation methodology in STEM programs. In 2015, he accepted a one-year appointment as an intermittent expert at NSF and in that, capacity served as a program officer for the ADVANCE and HBCU UP Programs within the Human Resource Development Division of the EHR Directorate. From 2017 to 2020 he served as director of strategic initiatives within the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of STEM Leadership (CASL). CASL is the first of its kind research center devoted to enhancing the role of the nation’s HBCUs as they provide critical research contributions to support the broadening participation in STEM efforts of NSF. In August 2020 Dr. Hall formally retired from his faculty position at NAU. Despite his retirement he continues to hold appointments as a Senior Scholar at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (where he also serves as a member of the Inclusive Excellence Commission) and a Distinguished Scholar, in the Marie Fielder Center of Fielding Graduate University

Michelle Knight-Manuel is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University and executive editor of Teachers College Record. Previously, she served as an Associate Dean and Senior Advisor to the Provost/Dean at Teachers College, Columbia University. Earlier in her career she was a former middle school ESL/French teacher and college advisor in Oakland, California. Her scholarly work includes three distinct yet complementary strands of inquiry: college readiness and access, immigrant youth’s civic strengths, and culturally relevant teacher preparation. She has published in such journals as the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Race, Ethnicity and Education, Review of Research in Education, and the Journal of Educational Policy. Her two books, co-authored with Joanne Marciano, are Classroom Cultures: Equitable Schooling for Racially Diverse Youth and College Ready: Preparing Black and Latino Youth for Higher Education through a Culturally Relevant Lens. Dr. Knight-Manuel is committed to engaged scholarship and partners with varying educational entities to develop and maintain culturally inclusive, equitable and just learning environments. She is the recipient of several honors and awards, including the AERA Research on Women in Education Willystine Goodsell Award and a Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Michelle Knight-Manuel has also served as the Director of Culturally Relevant College and Career Readiness for the New York City Department of Education’s Expanded Success Initiative and as a Senior Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Career and College Readiness at Boston University.

Joan LaFrance, Ed.D., is owner of Mekinak Consulting, a management and evaluation service in Seattle, Washington specializing in educational program evaluation, research, and management studies. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Joan received her doctorate Harvard University, and a Master’s of Public Administration from the University of Washington. Mekinak Consulting has a long history of evaluation of programs in Tribal Colleges and Universities, tribal and indigenous communities, and for non-profit organizations. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through a grant to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), she conducted the research and co-authored the book Indigenous Evaluation Framework: Telling Our Story in Our Place and Time. Currently, she is conducting research on the application of the Indigenous Evaluation Framework in three tribal college communities. She was a founding member of the Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation TIG in AEA, and believes that traditional Indigenous voices and values will make significant contributions to evaluation theory and practice. In addition to her ongoing work in American Indian tribal communities, she is working projects in the United States Affiliated Pacific Islands to assess culturally relevant mathematics curriculum and climate change education projects. She was the lead evaluator for CEMELA, a NSF funded four university consortium dedicated to research in mathematics learning among Latino populations. Joan has taught research and evaluation methods in graduate programs for the University of Washington, Western Washington University, The Evergreen State College, and Lesley University. She has done municipal budgeting, program development and management, and curriculum development. She has also worked as an internal consultant in the City of Seattle’s Performance Resource Group where she was involved in government improvement efforts such as performance measures, surveys of city residents and businesses, organizational research and organizational development.

Monica B. Mitchell is Founder and President of MERAssociates (MERA), LLC, an award-winning education research and evaluation consultancy based in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Dr. Mitchell specializes in STEM broadening participation throughout the educational and professional continuum with extensive experience in underserved and racially minoritzed communities. MERA was originally launched in response to the pressing need of coupling cultural responsiveness with content expertise in the conduct of evaluation focused on broadening STEM participation. A core commitment of MERA is to advance inclusiveness of underrepresented principal investigators and institutions of higher education in programs funded by federal agencies. Since its 2008 inception, MERA assistance has led to approximately $50 million in grants to support this aim. Before launching MERA, Dr. Mitchell was Associate at the Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network where she designed professional development and technical assistance to Minority-serving institutions (MSIs), primarily HBCUs and Tribal Colleges and Universities, in program evaluation, program development, and education research. She has also served as a program officer (rotator) at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL) and the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE). She stays active in designing and providing professional development to increase the competitiveness of PIs and institutions underrepresented in federally funded programs. Along with colleagues, Dr. Mitchell recently released a book on Fostering Computational Thinking among Underrepresented Students in which a chapter on program evaluation in STEM broadening participation is featured.

Sharon Nelson-Barber, a sociolinguist, directs Culture and Language in STEM Education in WestEd’s Science and Engineering Program. Dr. Nelson-Barber’s research centers on understanding how the sociocultural contexts in which students live influence the ways in which they make sense of schooling in mathematics and science. Working side by side with other Indigenous researchers whose communities span the lower 48 US states, Alaska, Micronesia, and many areas of Polynesia, she also explores how aspects of cultural knowledge can become visible in assessment and evaluation to ensure that schooling is equitable for all students. She is co-founder of POLARIS—Pacific/Polar Opportunities to Learn, Advance and Research Indigenous Systems—a research and development network that supports healthy communities by integrating Indigenous perspectives with new frontiers of knowledge that strengthen educational transformation. An ongoing project convenes Indigenous elders and scientists to document technical solutions to climate change from both Indigenous and western academic perspectives, and heighten international attention to the need to preserve cultures and societies amidst rising waters and melting ice. This, together with her collaborations with national Native organizations, helps WestEd maintain important community connections and keeps WestEd’s work timely and relevant to partner populations. Nelson-Barber has published extensively, most recently as editor and contributor to the two-volume compendium, Indigenous STEM Education: Perspectives from the Pacific Islands, the Americas, and Asia, available in 2022. She also has a chapter in the 2022 Handbook of Multicultural Science Education and wrote the prologue to the 2020 book, Living Culturally Responsive Mathematics Education with/in Indigenous Communities. Recent chapters and articles appear in the Handbook of Indigenous Education, the International Review of Education, Contemporary Educational Psychology, and the Journal of Indian Education. Nelson-Barber serves on a number of national advisory boards on STEM, language, and education. Prior to coming to WestEd, she taught in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University and later in Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She has received two WestEd awards: the Paul D. Hood Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Profession and the Ed Myers Award for Exceptional Contribution to the WestEd Community. The American Educational Research Association recognized her both as a Distinguished Scholar and as a Distinguished Contributor to Research in Indigenous Education. Nelson-Barber earned a doctorate in human development from Harvard University and completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University as a Spencer Fellow.

Dr. Leah C. Neubauer is an Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. She is Affiliated Faculty with the Center for Global Health and the Program of African Studies (PAS) and Ad-Hoc Faculty in The Graduate School. She serves as Director of Accreditation for the Program in Public Health (PHP), and Co-Director of the MPH Degree Global Health concentration and Accelerated Public Health Program (APHP). Her primary area of scholarship is curriculum development and training in the public health and health-related professions. She conducts collaborative global mixed-methods research focused on the development, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of school-based sexual and reproductive health programs. In addition, her work employs multidisciplinary, theory-driven approaches to accreditation, teaching, training, and evaluation capacity-building within varied settings. She teaches graduate-level courses in global health, public health and evaluation.

Caroline S. Turner is Professor and Graduate Coordinator for the Doctorate in Educational Leadership Program at California State University, Sacramento. Previously, she served as Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Education at Arizona State University (ASU) where she founded and directed graduate programs in Higher & Postsecondary Education. Prior to her appointment at ASU, she served as a Professor of Educational Policy & Administration at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities where she was appointed as Research Coordinator of Faculty Development Programs in the Office of the Associate Vice President for Multicultural and Academic Affairs. She co-founded the national Keeping our Faculties of Color Symposium which continues to this day. Turner currently serves as Immediate Past President of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), the leading scholarly society for research on higher education. Turner’s research interests focus on access, equity, leadership, and qualitative approaches to policy research in higher education. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals. She has also served on numerous peer-reviewed journal editorial boards and is one of the founding editorial advisory board members for the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. Her publications, particularly Faculty of Color in Academe: Bittersweet Success (with Myers, Jr.) and Diversifying the Faculty: A Guidebook for Search Committees(widely adopted selling over 17,000 copies), advanced the dialogue on faculty gender and racial/ethnic diversity among scholars and practitioners. Her recent book, Modeling Mentoring Across Race/Ethnicity and Gender: Practices to Cultivate the Next Generation of Diverse Faculty (with González), addresses the preparation of the next generation of higher education professionals. Turner received her undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of California, Davis and her Ph.D. from Stanford University.