Eight new faculty are adding to the wealth of knowledge and experience of the College of Education and Human Ecology this fall. Four new faculty are joining Educational Studies, two are strengthening Human Sciences and two are bringing their expertise to Teaching and Learning.
Department of Educational Studies
Matthew J. Mayhew
William Ray and Marie Adamson Flesher Professor in Educational Administration
Interests: How collegiate conditions, educational practices and student experiences influence learning and democratic outcomes. Interests include students’ moral reasoning, interfaith cooperation and productive exchange across worldview differences and diversity
Newly arrived from New York University, Matthew J. Mayhew is a leading scholar in the study of how college impacts students. His focus is on the development of college students’ worldviews regarding diversity and spirituality, and how to improve college programming for positive outcomes. He currently is conducting a major study on how to support student interfaith cooperation in partnership with North Carolina State University and the Interfaith Youth Corps. His initial results from 20,000 undergraduate college students at 122 institutions reveal that incoming freshmen expect college to provide opportunities to get to know students of diverse religious and nonreligious perspectives. Mayhew is the lead author of volume three in the series How College Affects Students, the most highly cited synthesis of research in the field. His previous research attracted interest when he found that high GPA students are not the most innovative. He has published more than 50 articles in top journals, including the Journal of Higher Education and Research in Higher Education. Many of his studies use new methodological approaches that give credibility to his findings. Mayhew has been awarded over $14 million in funding from sources including the U.S. Department of Education, the Kauffman Foundation and the Merrifield Family Foundation.
Ana-Paula Correia
Associate Professor of Learning Technologies
Interests: Learning experience design, online and mobile learning and teaching, collaborative learning, curriculum development, program and product evaluation
Correia brings more than 25 years of experience in learning design and instructional systems technology to her new role in the Department of Educational Studies. Specifically, her expertise in distance education, online and mobile learning, collaborative learning and entrepreneurial educational approaches have been published in nearly 30 peer-reviewed journals. During her tenure at Iowa State University, Correia’s research was awarded for excellence several times by the Association for Educational Communication and Technology as well as the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. Correia earned her PhD from Indiana University-Bloomington.
Anne-Marie Nuñez
Associate Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs
Interests: Social stratification and equity in higher education, institutional diversity in higher education, faculty advancement in higher education
Nuñez’s research focuses on how factors such as race, ethnicity, class and linguistics shape postsecondary opportunities. She is noted for groundbreaking research on first-generation students, Latinos, migrant students, English learners and Hispanic-serving institutions. Her articles have appeared in Educational Researcher, Harvard Educational Review and The Journal of Higher Education. She has published book chapters in the Handbook of Theory and Research in Higher Education and New Directions for Higher Education. Her co-edited book, Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Advancing Research and Transformative Practice, received a 2016 International Latino Book Award. A former associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, she received the 2011 Association for the Study of Higher Education Council on Ethnic Participation Award for her research on historically underserved groups. She serves as associate editor of The Journal of Higher Education, published by The Ohio State University Press. She holds doctoral and master’s degrees from UCLA, a master’s degree from Stanford University, and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.
Brett Zyromski
Assistant Professor of counselor education
Interests: Data-driven school counseling, evidence-based school counseling, school counseling evaluation, recognized ASCA-model programs, school counselor education
Zyromski comes from Northern Kentucky University where he impacted the teaching of new school counselors and obtained $5.5 million in grants to actively support the work of professional school counselors in 42 districts in the Kentucky-Ohio-Indiana region. His work with urban youth has spanned his career and includes research into post-traumatic stress disorder in black and Latino populations. With his research interests focused on evidenced-based, data-driven school counseling, Zyromski co-founded the national Evidence-Based School Counseling Conference. The annual event helps school counselors share best practices and examine their effectiveness in closing students' achievement gaps, opportunity and attainment. He earned his PhD from North Carolina State University.
Department of Human Sciences
Rachel E. Kopec
Assistant Professor of Human Nutrition
Discovery Themes Food for Health
Interests: Metabolism of carotenoids during human digestion, the interplay of metabolic pathways of fat soluble vitamin uptake, utilization and excretion, chlorophylls and chlorophyll derivatives
Kopec began in pharmaceutical sciences before moving on to study the role of phytochemicals in human health. As a postdoctoral researcher for the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, she studied carotenoid metabolism in healthy humans during digestion using stable isotopes. At Ohio State, Kopec plans to use mass spectrometry techniques of targeted and untargeted metabolomics — the study of the byproducts produced by chemical reactions in the body — to understand the pathway overlap between fat-soluble vitamins and phytochemicals. She will also study the capacity of chlorophylls to reduce the adverse impact of persistent environmental toxins, like those found in plastics, on human health.
Qing “Stephanie” Liu
Assistant Professor of Hospitality Management
Interests: Social media and advertising, service and relationship management, technology innovations in the service industry
Liu’s research investigates consumer behavior in various hospitality contexts including online marketing, ethnic dining, service failure, loyalty programs and service innovations. Her dissertation examines the role of hedonic framing in advertising painful yet pleasurable services, for example, thrill rides and Thai massage. She earned the International Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Educator’s 2015 Best Paper Award and her research has appeared in top-tier journals such as Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. Liu received a PhD in Hospitality Management from Pennsylvania State University in 2016. She also earned an MAS in Applied Statistics and an MS in Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management from Penn State.
Department of Teaching and Learning
Christian ‘Chris’ Faltis
Department Chair; Professor of foreign, second and multilingual language education
Interests: Bilingualism and teaching English learners in school contexts, best practices for preparing preservice and inservice teachers to teach, especially bilingual language learners and critical pedagogy
Faltis brings to EHE more than two decades of experience directing teacher education programs. Newly arrived from the University of California at Davis, he was the Fiddyment Endowed Chair in Teacher Education and a professor of language, literature and culture. Under his leadership, the teacher education program moved to a more prominent role at UC Davis, and he developed a research agenda that resonated with the faculty and showcased their extraordinary scholarship. As a scholar, he introduced code switching--now called translanguaging--in the late 1980s. His research legitimized bilingual usage in teaching. In the 1990s, he developed “joinfostering,” which supports bringing together students from diverse ethnic and language backgrounds. His book on the subject was used in more than 500 teacher education programs. Faltis has consulted with school districts in seven states, helping teachers and administrators meet the needs of language learners. He received more than $5 million in research grants, published 22 books and 80 articles or chapters, edited top journals, including Teacher Education Quarterly, and currently serves on three journal editorial boards, including the Bilingual Research Journal. In 2016, the American Educational Research Association inducted him as a Fellow. His MA and PhD are from Stanford University.
Julia Hagge
Assistant Professor of Reading Education, Marion campus
Interests: Literacy practices and processes embedded within online programming communities
Hagge’s research focuses on inclusive literacy practices for diverse learners. She is interested in the ways potentially marginalized students are afforded increased access to meaning-making via new media literacies. She has published in PDS Partners and has an article under review at Gifted Child Today. Her research goal is to examine how early adolescent students use programming to design digital media and how literacy practices are supported in an online community. She was an instructor at the University of South Florida while earning her PhD.
