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Harvard Graduate School of Education Adds 11 New Faculty Members

Incoming group includes experts in the areas of higher education, teacher education, economics, ethics, and education policy.

Dean James Ryan has announced the appointment of 11 new faculty members to the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“I am thrilled that these 11 new faculty will be joining our community. Following a number of retirements and departures, and with the addition of new programs like Harvard Teacher Fellows and the Ph.D. in education, we are excited to be welcoming so many talented scholars and leaders across several priority areas for the school,” Ryan said. “I am grateful to the search committees who have devoted a great deal of effort to ensuring our success in growing our faculty ranks, and I welcome the variety of methods, diverse areas of focus, and commitment to collaborative work — both within HGSE and across the university — that these new faculty collectively demonstrate.”  

The following faculty have joined the Ed School:

  • Danielle Allen has been named a professor of education and will serve as a principal investigator at Project Zero. She will maintain a joint appointment at Harvard Faculty of Arts Sciences as a professor in the government department and will serve as director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Allen comes to Harvard from the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J. where she directed the Democratic Knowledge Project. Among Allen’s many recognitions and honors are a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship (popularly known as the “MacArthur Genius Grant”), grants from the Spencer and Ford foundations, and the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago. Allen has authored four books, including Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education, and was the co-editor of Education, Democracy, and Justice, the winner of the 2013 PROSE Award for best book in education.
  • James Antony, who will join the faculty as a senior lecturer in the Higher Education Program, will teach courses on diversity and equity in higher education, and higher-education leadership. Prior to coming to the Ed School, Antony served as the associate provost at Yale University and professor adjunct in educational leadership and management at the Yale School of Management, as well as a fellow of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia. Antony’s research primarily focuses on the preparation of forward-thinking leaders in higher education settings. From 1995 to 2012, he served in various faculty and administrative leadership roles at the University of Washington, including professor in education leadership and policy and associate dean for academic programs in the College of Education. He is a former fellow of the American Council on Education, and has served as a visiting professor of higher education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
  • Roland Fryer has been appointed a professor of education at HGSE. He will maintain his appointment as the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where he became the youngest African American faculty member in the history of the university to receive tenure. Fryer, the founder and faculty director of the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University (EdLabs), will teach courses listed jointly at HGSE and FAS, and will advise doctoral students. Like Allen, Roland Fryer is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, is a former junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, and, most recently, was the 2015 recipient of the American Economic Association’s (AEA) John Bates Clark Medal — given to “that American economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” In announcing the award earlier this year, the AEA wrote that “Fryer is the leading economist working on the economics of race and education, and he has produced the most important work in recent years on combating the racial divide, one of America’s most profound and long-lasting social problems.”
  • Noah Heller has been named a lecturer on education and master teacher in residence (mathematics) for the Harvard Teachers Fellows Program, a new Ed School program that will offer innovative teacher preparation to Harvard College seniors who wish to become middle- or high-school teachers. Heller joins HGSE from Math For America where he mentored new math teachers and directed the development and expansion of a professional development program for more than 700 K–12 "master teachers" of math and science in New York City. His research focuses on ninth-grade students’ identification with mathematics in regard to how they see themselves as math persons. A founding teacher of the New York Harbor School, a public high school in Brooklyn, Heller has also taught courses in secondary math methods at Hunter College and calculus at Pratt Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in urban education with a focus on science, math, and technology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. 
  • Sarah Leibel has been named a lecturer on education and master teacher in residence (English) for Harvard Teacher Fellows Program. An instructor of English language arts and academic writing, she has been teaching and mentoring new teachers since 2011. Throughout her teaching career, Leibel has focused on urban education, teaching English language arts in Providence and Pawtucket, Rhode Island public schools and administering a school-based mentoring program for high need middle school students in San Francisco. At Brown University, Leibel was a lecturer and the visiting director of elementary education. She currently serves on several education-related advisory boards including that of 360, a Providence public high school designed collaboratively with students, community members, parents and teachers that will open in the fall of 2015. She earned a B.A. in comparative literature and an M.A.T. in secondary English from Brown University.
  • Stephen Mahoney has joined HGSE as lecturer of education and associate director of the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program. A graduate of Brown (B.A. in international relations), Stanford (M.A. in curriculum and instruction), and Boston College (Ed.D. in education leadership), Mahoney has served as a school principal for the past 17 years, including the last 10 as the founding principal of the Springfield Renaissance School — an urban, high-poverty middle and high school in Springfield, Massachusetts. Under Mahoney’s leadership, each graduating student has been accepted to college for five consecutive years, and students have received $3.4 million in scholarships to continue their education. For the past two years, Mahoney has been an adjunct member of the Smith College department of Education and Child Development.
  • Dana Charles McCoy has been named an assistant professor of education. She will teach research methods courses as well as a foundational course linking human development and education policy. McCoy has an A.B. in psychological and brain sciences from Dartmouth College, a Ph.D. in applied psychology from New York University, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow working with the Ed School-based Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. McCoy researches the ways that poverty-related risk factors in children's home, school, and neighborhood environments affect the development of their cognitive and socioemotional skills in early childhood. She also studies one of the most talked-about topics in education today: the development, refinement, and evaluation of early intervention programs designed to promote positive development and resilience in young children.
  • Luke Miratrix, formerly an assistant professor of statistics at Harvard University, has joined the Ed School as an assistant professor of education. At the Ed School he will teach applied quantitative methods courses, including a course on multilevel and longitudinal models. Miratrix, who holds a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California–Berkeley and a master’s in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has recently been working on applied projects in effectiveness of educational programs. As part of the HGSE faculty-convened group, Economies of Education, he has examined quantitative research in education. In addition to his classroom experience at Harvard, Miratrix has served as a high school mathematics and computer science teacher in both Massachusetts and California.
  • Victor Pereira Jr. has been named a lecturer on education and master teacher in residence (science) for the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program. For the past 14 years, he has served as a teacher, coach, and mentor at Excel High School in the Boston Public Schools. In 2012, Pereira won the Amgen Award for Science Teaching Excellence, an honor recognizing science educators who have demonstrated an outstanding ability to inspire student success. Since 2004, Pereira has worked in HGSE’s Teacher Education Program as an instructor, as well as in aiding student teachers in the practica and mentoring teachers during the Cambridge-Harvard Summer Academy. He earned his B.S. and M.A.T. degrees from Boston College.
  • Eric Shed has been appointed lecturer on education and director of the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program. He comes to HGSE from Brown University where he was a lecturer and director of history and social studies secondary education. Shed, who holds education degrees from New York University (M.A.) and Stanford University (Ph.D.), is currently the lead investigator on a Library of Congress-funded project that explores how K–12 educators can use primary sources to teach local history. Through his work with aspiring teachers at Brown, NYU, and Stanford, Shed has gained extensive experience training teachers in areas focused on pedagogical technique, history and social sciences, students with special needs, and overseeing field placements. His work as a teacher educator has been greatly informed by eight years of experience as a New York City high school social studies teacher in three distinct types of urban schools: a small alternative high school, a large comprehensive high school, and an early college magnet school. The respect he has among his colleagues is best exemplified by one of his recommenders from Stanford who described Shed as “the finest teacher I have ever seen at the college level, anywhere.”
  • Eric Taylor has been appointed assistant professor of education. In the upcoming year, he will teach courses in microeconomics and evidence-based leadership. In addition to his scholarship on labor and personnel economics in the education sector, Taylor studies one of the most pressing issues in education today: the impact of instructional technology in the classroom. Specifically, he has sought to determine how instructional computer tools change the work of classroom teachers and alter teacher contributions to student learning. His research — which has been featured in SlateTimeThe Washington Post, and Education Week — will have far reaching impact on education policy and practice. A recent alumnus of Stanford University and recipient of a 2014–15 Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, Taylor was recognized by the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 2013 for excellence in teaching and mentoring. He also previously worked as a senior research manager and analyst at the Ed School-based Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard.

Read more about the new appointees to the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program.

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