Alumni

PARTICIPANTS

2026 Cohort

Sarah Cox is an assistant professor of Special Education. Her scholarly interests focus on academic support for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Her current projects explore the identification and implementation of evidence-based practices to improve mathematical outcomes for middle school students with ASD. Prior to joining the MSU community, Sarah was an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Florida State University.
Cox serves on the editorial review board for Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities. She is also a contributing member of the Science of Math Organization, where she advocates for the use of research-based instructional practices to improve mathematical outcomes for students with disabilities. Her research has been supported by funding from the Organization for Autism Research and the Institute for Educational Sciences.

Marianne Rice is an assistant professor of literacy education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a faculty fellow of the Tennessee Reading Research Center. Her research interests include evidence-based early literacy instruction, early identification of students at-risk for reading difficulties, and effectively supporting teacher knowledge and practice in early literacy instruction and intervention. She earned her Ph.D. in educational psychology and special education from Texas A&M University. Rice spent over 10 years teaching kindergarten and first grade as well as working as a reading specialist in public education prior to moving into higher education.

Katherine A. Graves is an Assistant Professor of Special Education at Utah State University with research centered on promoting the safety, well-being, and rights of children and adolescents with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD). She is committed to conducting research that addresses the following: (a) the complex and multifaceted issues surrounding the education of students who engage in challenging behaviors and (b) the development and support of the implementation of evidence-based interventions that promote the dignity and autonomy of youth with disabilities.

David Furjanic, PhD, NCSP is an Assistant Professor in the School Psychology Program at the Morgridge College of Education, University of Denver. His research focuses on coaching and professional development and data-based decision-making in schools to improve educators' ability to promote equitable student outcomes. Two current projects examine CBM administration accuracy: one tracking how accuracy develops during training and another exploring accuracy across a national sample of practicing educators. He applied to the DMDS Workshop to build more robust and shareable data management systems to improve ease of onboarding, analyses, and open science practices.

Brett Grant is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the College of Staten Island (CSI). Prior to coming to CSI, Brett was a postdoctoral associate in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University and a postdoctoral researcher in the Black Education Research Center (BERC) at Teachers College, Columbia University. Brett's research looks at holistic educational thought in K-12 schools and is interested in how project and place-based learning contribute to the development of the whole person.
Brett received his Ph.D. from the Department of Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership (EPOL) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Originally from San Francisco, CA, Brett received his B.A. from UCLA, where he majored in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations.

Kelsey Klein is a pediatric research scientist at the House Institute Foundation. Her research focuses on the effects of auditory access and cognitive skills on the listening and spoken language outcomes of school-age children who use hearing aids and/or cochlear implants. She is particularly interested in identifying malleable audiologic, language, and environmental factors that support effective communication for school-age children and adolescents in everyday life.

Anne Reed is a speech-language pathologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders at Texas State University. Her research bridges research and practice by using implementation science to study how school-based speech-language services can more effectively meet the language and literacy needs of students with speech-language and reading difficulties.

Yan Leigh is the Director of Research and Evaluation at the Center for Thriving Children at Boston College, where her work focuses on understanding how integrated student support systems can help students thrive and reduce educational inequality. Her research combines quantitative and mixed-methods approaches to examine both the impact and implementation of school-based interventions at scale.
She is currently leading a multi-year, Institute of Education Sciences (IES)-funded study examining the effectiveness of City Connects across diverse contexts, with a particular focus on attendance, academic achievement, and system-level implementation. Her interests include research-practice partnerships and advancing the use of administrative and program data to support whole-child development.
Yan holds a PhD in Economics. Prior to her current role, she served as Director of Research and Development at the Mississippi Department of Education, where she worked at the intersection of research, policy, and practice. Through her work, she aims to generate actionable evidence that informs policy and practice and strengthens the capacity of schools and communities to support student success.

Alice Guo is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Berry College in Georgia. My research examines adolescent and young adult close relationship networks, with a focus on how youth manage their communication and disclosure across multiple relationships, such as with parents, siblings, and peers. Recent research interests include the role of technology-mediated communication in close relationships and how this impacts individual well-being.

Claire Selin is a research scientist at Boys Town National Research Hospital in the Center for Childhood Deafness, Language, & Learning. Her research is focused on how adversity exposure (e.g., maltreatment, witnessing violence, household dysfunction) influences language acquisition and increases risk for developmental language disorder (DLD). Claire addresses this research intersection through an interdisciplinary, biopsychosocial, and genetically-informed framework. Her long-term goals are: 1) to better understand the causal pathways between adversity and DLD, and 2) to improve diagnostic decision-making when speech-language pathologists are working with youth who have suspected adversity exposure co-occurring with DLD.

Erin Tebben is the associate director of research and program evaluation with the Virtual Lab School at The Ohio State University. With a background in social work and early care and education, Dr. Tebben's research interests are centered around supporting the adults who care for young children. Recent work has included projects involving quantitative analyses of secondary data and mixed-methods evaluations of intervention implementation.

Valerie Umscheid is currently a post-doctoral associate at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan and her B.A. in Cognitive Science and Educational Studies from Carleton College. Her research broadly examines how children and adolescents think about the world around them, and what factors influence their thinking. Outside of research, Valerie enjoys spending time outside, playing with her cat, and practicing aerial arts.

Rhonda Raines is a postdoctoral scholar at the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy with a background in reading education at both the K-12 and collegiate levels. She is currently working as part of the Efficacy of Literacy Inservice Teacher Professional Learning (LIT-Pro) research project team, which is focused on examining the effects of a teacher professional learning program on teacher knowledge, teacher instructional practice, and student language and literacy outcomes. She is also part of the Collaborating Researchers & Educators Apply Technology to Establish Evidence-Based Practices (CREATE-EBP) project team, which leverages advancements in technology to develop an innovative approach to accelerate testing and translation of generalizable evidence-based practices (EBPs) in education. Dr. Raines’s research interests center around preparation and training for teachers of reading, with a focus on training methods, building teachers’ specialized knowledge and skills, and teacher instructional practice. Through this focus on ensuring teachers of reading are knowledgeable and effective, she hopes to aid in ensuring that all students have access to high-quality reading instruction.

LaTreese Hall, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary psychology researcher and educator specializing in developmental science and education. She is the principal investigator of the Gamification, Learning, and Development (GLAD) Lab, where she mentors students and leads collaborative research. Her work focuses on gamified approaches to teaching, parent–child communication, and designing processes that support student engagement. Her current research includes a study examining whether gamifying fine motor practice and interventions increases child engagement, as well as an infant behavior study demonstrating that parents participating in infant behavior programs produce more spatial language with their infants. Dr. Hall teaches project-based, interactive courses that engage students as active participants in their learning.

Alexus G. Ramirez, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Merced, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Education from the University of Delaware. Her research explores how children's early experiences shape school readiness outcomes across diverse linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Through this work, she aims to identify and disseminate culturally sustaining strategies that leverage children's strengths to support their language, executive functioning, and socio-emotional skills.

Kimberly McFadden is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Iowa Reading Research Center at the University of Iowa. She earned her PhD in Special Education from Lehigh University. Kim's research focuses on reading interventions for secondary students with reading disabilities.

Katie Valentine is an assistant professor in the Counseling and School Psychology program at Florida State. She's interested in interprofessional collaboration to support kids with learning and language disabilities, with specific expertise in writing and writing assessment.

Kimberly Crespo, PhD, CCC-SLP, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at Boston University. Her program of research examines how language ability and experience interact to shape learning in monolingual and bilingual children, with a particular focus on understanding developmental variability across typical and language disordered populations. Using a range of experimental methods, her work aims to (1) identify sources of developmental variability in language outcomes and (2) use these to predict trajectories of language impairment and inform early identification. Her research has been supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH NIDCD) and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation.

Kali Woodruff Carr is a staff scientist at the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children’s Hospital. In my research, I investigate how the cascading forces of maturation and experience sculpt sensory, perceptual, and cognitive systems integral to auditory processing, perceptual learning, and language development. The overarching goal of my work is to advance understanding of the neural mechanisms and experience-related factors that promote healthy brain development, to identify early markers of communication delays and disorders, and to design personalized interventions that maximize well-being and promote effective functioning across the lifespan. I employ an interdisciplinary approach grounded in both basic and translational science, integrating behavioral, electroencephalography (EEG), and eye-tracking methodologies.

Elise Allen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Northern Colorado in the School of Psychological Sciences (and program in Educational Psychology). Her research focuses on motivation in secondary and post-secondary settings. Her recent work is primarily related to Situated Expectancy-Value Theory and, specifically, on students’ perceptions of motivational costs, or the negative aspects of task / course engagement. Much of Dr. Allen's work uses longitudinal methodologies, in which students’ perceptions are measured repeatedly throughout the course of a study. Her recent publications and works-in-progress include developments related to identifying antecedents of students’ cost perceptions and how costs relate to teacher-student relationships over time, among others. Dr. Allen’s broader research interests and expertise also include work in with other motivational theories as well as relations between motivation and self-regulated learning.

Sandra B. Vanegas is a Research Associate Professor at the School of Social Work and Director of Research at the Texas Center for Disability Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She also serves as the Clinical Training Director for the Autism Consortium of Texas LEND program. Her interdisciplinary work bridges developmental psychology, social work, and disability studies, with a focus on culturally informed research and interventions for neurodevelopmental disorders.
Dr. Vanegas earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a minor in Statistics from Loyola University Chicago, where she investigated cognitive processing styles in children with autism. She holds an M.S. in Human Development and Early Childhood Disorders from the University of Texas at Dallas and dual B.A. degrees in Psychology and Comparative Literature from the University of Rochester. Her research program includes numerous federally funded research projects addressing disparities in autism diagnosis, healthcare transition readiness, and culturally tailored interventions for underserved populations.

Louisette Abikou is a postdoctoral researcher and nurse scientist whose research focuses on family sleep health, women’s health, and pediatric sleep disparities. Her work examines how sleep functions as an interdependent process within mother–child dyads during early childhood, with a particular interest in the role of socioecological and family contexts in shaping sleep health over time. She is currently developing objective, longitudinal approaches to studying dyadic sleep using wearable sleep technology and advanced longitudinal modeling. More broadly, her research aims to inform family-centered interventions that improve sleep health and reduce downstream health disparities across generations.

Hongcui (Hannie) Du is a postdoc at Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State University. My research focuses on how students learn from online resources and texts.