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Three Faculty Members Appointed for Fall 2006

Acting Dean and Lesser Professor Kathleen McCartney announced the addition of three new faculty members to HGSE this fall.

Pamela Mason will join HGSE as a lecturer on education and director of the Language and Literacy Program; Jennifer Thomson will work as a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer on education in the Language and Literacy Program and Mind, Brain, and Education Program; and Matthew Jukes, will join the International Education Program as an assistant professor.

Each newly-appointed faculty member brings a dynamic education background to HGSE.

Mason has taught reading and language arts courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in local colleges and universities, and has been active in professional associations and advisory boards related to reading. She holds two degrees in reading from HGSE: a M.A.T. (1970) and an Ed.D. (1975). After a year as a visiting professor at HGSE, Mason began a career in public elementary education in Massachusetts, a role in which her HGSE training became an asset in designing curriculum, evaluating textbook programs, and implementing effective professional development.

She has served as the language arts coordinator in the Arlington Public Schools, the director of reading in the Reading Public Schools, and an elementary program coordinator for reading and language arts in the Boston Public Schools. Since 1987, Mason has worked as an elementary school principal in several Massachusetts communities, including Newton, Haverhill, and Milton. She is currently the principal of the Tucker School in Milton.

Thomson works as a research associate at the Faculty of Education and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge in England. Her work focuses on the links between language and literacy development, specifically the possible role of linguistic rhythm sensitivity in dyslexia. She is particularly interested in how neuroscience can be applied to the fields of learning and remediation. She was trained as a speech and language pathologist in Sheffield, England, before undertaking work in the UK Health Service. She earned a Ph.D. in child health from University College London in 2004 where she focused on the research-practitioner divide, which remains an extremely important motivator behind her research today.

Jukes has worked with the Partnership for Child Development (PCD) at Imperial College London--initially based in Tanzania for two years--since completing a Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Oxford University in 1997. He has recently taken up a lectureship in international education at the Institute of Education in London. His research with PCD has helped establish the educational benefits of treating worm infections, iron deficiency, and malaria in preschool and school-aged children through projects based in India, Kenya, Tanzania, and the Gambia. His research also addresses HIV/AIDS and education, improvements in HIV prevention programs in Kenya, and educational access of orphans in Zimbabwe. He is also interested in improving access and quality in primary education, where he spent a year working for England's Department for International Development on these issues.

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