The College of Education is committed to providing a high quality learning experience to San Diego State University students.
This college has been raising the bar for more than 100 years and will welcome seven new staff members this fall. They are among 54 new faculty members joining the SDSU family this semester — the largest cohort of faculty to be hired by SDSU since the 2007/2008 academic year.
Department of Administration, Rehabilitation, and Postsecondary Education
Mark Tucker, Ph.D. (University of Northern Colorado, 2007) Tucker has a background in rehabilitation counseling and specializes in the interaction between disability, postsecondary training or education, and employment. His areas of interest include examining the relationships between individual, contextual, or case-service factors and rehabilitation outcomes of transition-age youth and adults with disabilities. He is presently examining the associations between specific rehabilitation services and vocational rehabilitation outcomes of individuals with traumatic brain injury; and is concurrently engaged in investigating the impact of intensive family-based interventions upon educational and vocational outcomes of child Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients.
Department of Child and Family Development
Sarah Rieth, Ph.D., BCBA-D, (UCSD, 2012) is a developmental psychopathologist whose research focuses on early social-communication intervention and autism spectrum disorders. Her current projects focus on the effectiveness and dissemination of evidence-based practice for autism in special education classrooms and blended developmental-behavioral models of intervention for toddlers at-risk for autism. Her research interests include the long-term influences of early intervention, active ingredients across treatment approaches for autism, promotion of social-emotional skills in early development, and distance training models for therapists and clinicians.
Alyson Shapiro, Ph.D. (University of Washington, 2004) Shapiro received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology and also did post-doctoral work focused on infant mental health. Her research focuses on infant and child development within context, and integrates the individual, interpersonal, and cultural aspects of development in both high and low risk families. This dual focus enables a more comprehensive understanding of issues that affect infant mental health, family dynamics, couple relationships and human development. She is currently conducting research testing a prevention program for families with new babies, and research examining the impact of prenatal couple discord on fetal and infant development.
Department of Counseling and School Psychology
Arianne Miller, Ph.D. (Adelphi University/Derner Institute, 2008) Miller is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist with specialties in multicultural and LGBTQ psychology, adolescence, and eating disorders. Her areas of research include the use of race and gender in the phenomenon known as "Gaydar," the relationship between beliefs about gender roles and how people conceptualize sexual orientation, and the improvement of self-care practices among clinicians and underserved communities. She is starting preliminary research on obstacles to self-care in professional psychology training. More broadly she is interested in the intersections of race, gender and sexuality wherever they may be found; food politics and obesity; and how to reduce stigma about mental illness and psychotherapy.
Laura Owen, Ph.D. (Oregon State University, 2012) Prior to finishing her Ph.D., Dr. Owen was a high school counselor, district school counseling supervisor, and a writer and co-principal investigator on two U.S. Department of Education Elementary and Secondary School Counseling grants. Laura’s dissertation looked at the U.S. Department of Education’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid Completion Pilot Project and examined the influence of school counselor outreach on FAFSA completion and college enrollment. Her current research looks at school counselor interventions to address the summer melt and the influence of customized and personalized text messages on FAFSA completion and college enrollment. She was recently awarded an Institute of Education Sciences grant to expand this work to a national sample of students.
Nellie Tran, Ph.D. (University of Illinois, Chicago 2010) Tran is a community psychologist specializing in the study of subtle forms of discrimination (i.e., micro aggressions, racial color-blindness), especially pertaining to race and gender. She is particularly interested in understanding which biases exist in different contexts, how people adapt to them, and how best to change environments to reduce and buffer people from the impact of subtle biases. Her current projects explore the impact of subtle biases on women in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math disciplines, the effect of micro aggressions on U.S.-born Asian Americans, how school/classroom norms influence the way students think about and understand race.
School of Teacher Education
Melissa Soto, Ph.D., (University of California, Davis, 2014) Dr. Soto is a mathematics educator specializing in cognitively guided instruction and young children's mathematical thinking. Her areas of interest include investigating how elementary children make sense of mathematics, providing mathematical professional development opportunities for elementary teachers, and examining ways to implement mobile technology in the classroom. She is presently researching the affordances of screencasts in documenting children's mathematical explanations and as a formative assessment tool for teachers.