Dean’s Office
Dorothea Anagnostopoulos, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Dorothea Anagnostopoulos, associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, has been named the Neag School’s associate dean for academic affairs.
In this role, Anagnostopoulos will oversee and maintain high-quality academic programs across the Neag School while developing and leading the implementation of inclusive, equity-oriented community building, networking, and professional development programming for faculty. She also will be directing School-wide accreditation efforts and monitoring course enrollments.
Anagnostopoulos previously served as the Neag School’s executive director of teacher education from 2013 to 2019. She also is the vice president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA)’s Division K, Teaching and Teacher Education. A leading scholar on school reform, Anagnostopoulos holds a doctorate in education from the University of Chicago.
Morgaen Donaldson, Associate Dean for Research and Philip E. Austin Endowed Chair
Professor Morgaen Donaldson, director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis, Research, and Evaluation (CEPARE) and the Neag School’s Ed.D. program, has been appointed the Neag School’s associate dean for research.
As associate dean for research, she will work collaboratively with faculty and staff across the Neag School to develop and enact a plan to support research and the securing of grants, and will be responsible for developing initiatives to enhance the research climate and provide opportunities in the Neag School for faculty, staff, and students to expand their research skills, funding sources, and productivity. Donaldson also will serve as a resource and facilitator for Neag School faculty and staff who are considering writing grants, have operational questions concerning funded grants, or are encountering problems or difficulties with grant-related activities.
In addition, Donaldson has been named the Philip E. Austin Endowed Chair.
Her areas of expertise include educational leadership, teacher quality, educational policy, and education reform. Her research has centered on educator development, including educator performance evaluation, teaching and leadership quality, and school reform, with her work on teacher evaluation practices in particular having gained state and national attention. Her work is also closely connected to the work of policymakers affiliated with the Connecticut State Department of Education, superintendents, principals, and teachers within the state’s public schools.
Donaldson’s three-year appointment as the Austin Chair was approved by the UConn Board of Trustees this past spring. She completed her Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Read more about Donaldson’s recently announced appointment to the Austin Chair.
Ann Traynor, Assistant Dean and Certification Officer
Also in the Dean’s Office, Ann Traynor has been appointed assistant dean and certification officer. She directs advising, educator certification, recruitment, retention, and career preparation at the Neag School of Education. Traynor is also a member of the University’s Advising Council and serves on the Neag School’s Assessment, Curricula and Courses, and Global Education Committees, as well as co-chair, Standard 3, for the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) Accreditation Self-Study.
In 2011, the UConn Undergraduate Student Government recognized her with its Advisor of the Year Award. She holds an Ed.D. in educational leadership from the University of Connecticut.
Traynor had been serving as interim assistant dean since this past spring.
Department of Educational Leadership
Chen Chen, Assistant Professor
The Department of Educational Leadership also welcomes Chen Chen as an assistant professor of sport management, who arrives from the University of Alberta in Canada. Chen, whose research interests include critical sport management, settler colonialism and decolonization, and social, racial, and environmental justice, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 2019 and completed a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded postdoctoral fellowship titled “Reimagining Sport from the Margins” at the same institution in 2021.
“I ground my teaching and research with an ethics of relational accountability, which emphasizes the consideration of historical, collective responsibility towards human and non-human communities of not only current but also future generations on this planet,” Chen says. “I am humbled to visit the land we know today as Connecticut (originated from the Algonquin word Quinnehtukqut that means ‘beside the long tidal river’) and I look forward to upholding my responsibility as a guest.”
Alexandra Freidus, Assistant Professor
Alexandra Freidus joins the Department of Educational Leadership from Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Her research interests include school integration, youth organizing, and diverse classrooms.
“My scholarship asks what roles educators, policymakers, families, and young people play in sustaining and interrupting racialized patterns in K-12 schools,” Freidus says. “I use lenses from Critical Race Theory, cultural sociology, and the anthropology of education to unravel these relationships, examining how community stakeholders conceptualize student diversity, how school and district administrators enact educational policy, and how these local contexts relate to schools’ central work – teaching and learning.”
Freidus earned her Ph.D. in urban education in 2018 from New York University. She served previously for five years as a high school teacher in California, and also led professional development in urban schools in both California and New York.
NaRi Shin, Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor NaRi Shin also joins the Neag School’s sport management program. She previously served at Texas Tech University, and her research interests include sport and development in relation to globalization and diaspora.
“The aim of my research,” Shin says, “is to enhance our critical understandings of how globalization, diaspora, and cultural interactions between and across continents changes the ways in which we manage sport and development, and impacts both development of sport and development through sport.”
Shin completed her doctorate in recreation, sport, and tourism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019.
Sara Renzulli, Assistant Professor-in-Residence
Sara Renzulli ’11 MA, ’13 Ph.D., who has served for two years as an associate visiting professor in the Neag School, has been named assistant professor-in-residence in the Department of Educational Psychology’s counselor education and counseling psychology program. Her work will include creating and managing online courses and programs; teaching courses in counselor education and counseling psychology; advising graduate students; and supporting the CACREP accreditation process.
She also had previously served in numerous roles at the University of Connecticut, including as an academic advisor, adjunct faculty member, academic counselor, and university specialist at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.
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