By Laurel White
Three faculty from the School of Education have been honored with prestigious campuswide research awards from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.
David Kaplan, Emily Arthur, and Andy Garbacz are among just 32 faculty from across campus who were chosen to receive a 2024-2025 WARF Named Professorship or H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship. The distinctions acknowledge a track record of excellence in research and provide several years of dedicated funding to continue producing impactful work.
In a story released by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, interim vice chancellor for research Cynthia Czajkowski said the awards “recognize excellence in faculty research, academics, and outreach at various stages of their scholarly careers and provide an opportunity for continued development of their research programs.”
“I look forward to seeing the results of their imaginative use of these funds,” Czajkowski added.
David Kaplan
David Kaplan, Richard L. Venezky Professor of Educational Psychology in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology, was one of eight faculty members across campus honored with a WARF Named Professorship. The professorship comes with $100,000 and honors faculty who have made major contributions to the advancement of knowledge, primarily through their research endeavors, but also as a result of their teaching and service activities. Award recipients choose the names associated with their professorships.
Kaplan studies Bayesian statistical methods with applications to large-scale national and international educational assessments. Kaplan was chair of the Department of Educational Psychology from 2012 to 2015. In 2018, he received the Samuel J. Messick Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the American Psychological Association, an acknowledgement of his history of scientific contributions within the field of quantitative research methods. He also served as president of the Psychometric Society, an organization devoted to the advancement of quantitative methodology in the behavioral sciences, in 2023-2024 and as an international guest professor at the University of Heidelberg in 2023.
Emily Arthur
Emily Arthur, associate professor of art and printmaking and Book Art + Paper coordinator for the School of Education’s Art Department, was one of 13 faculty honored with an H.I. Romnes Fellowship. The Romnes fellowship, named after late WARF trustees president H.I. Romnes, recognizes faculty with exceptional research contributions within their first six years from promotion to a tenured position. The award comes with $60,000 that may be spent over five years.
Arthur works with scientists, including zoologists, ornithologists, mycologists, and botanists, to elucidate the craft- and knowledge-based disciplines of art and science. She has also worked with indigenous scholars and poets to integrate narratives between art, history, and natural science. In 2022, she was awarded an Eleanor M. Garvey Visiting Fellowship in Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard University to carry out her research proposal, “Secrets of Havell: Making Prints for ‘The Birds of America.’” For that project, she sought out historical materials and methods employed by the Robert Havell family of engravers in publishing John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America.” During her residency, she conducted etching and aquatint experiments based on the primary resources in the Harvard Libraries.
Her permanent collections include the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Andy Garbacz
Andy Garbacz, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and co-director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research’s School Mental Health Collaborative, also received an H.I. Romnes Fellowship.
Garbacz’s research focuses on mental health promotion, optimizing mental health interventions in school and community settings to center equity and justice, and improving adoption, implementation, and sustainment of those initiatives. Garbacz emphasizes development, testing, and scaling for dissemination of family-centered and family-school partnership interventions to promote youth mental health.
Last year, Garbacz was part of a team that received a $10.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to launch and operate a national center to expand and improve the country’s school-based mental health workforce of school psychologists, social workers, and other practitioners. And, earlier last year, Garbacz and a team of colleagues received a $6 million grant, also from the U.S. Department of Education, to prepare a new generation of school psychologists equipped with the knowledge and skills to better serve children and youth in the Madison Metropolitan School District. The project is designed to train 24 new school psychology graduate students from diverse backgrounds over the next five years, and then return them to the community to work.
Read the full article at: https://education.wisc.edu/news/three-school-of-education-faculty-honored-with-campuswide-warf-professorship-romnes-fellowship-research-honors/