Research Staff
H. Gary Cook, Ph.D.
Research Director
FLARE Principal Investigator
Phone: 608-890-0471
Email:
hcook@wisc.edu
Dr. H. Gary Cook works as the Research Director for the WIDA Consortium and is the FLARE Principal Investigator. His recent research interests have focused on assessment alignment as well as applying value-added modeling techniques in urban settings to address key educational questions.
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Karen Bach
Administrative Specialist
Phone: 608-890-4808
Email: kmbach2@wisc.edu
Karen Bach coordinates and provides administrative support for the WIDA research team. This includes planning and organizing WIDA conferences and workshops, completing travel and consultant reimbursements for staff and WIDA partners, and editing research papers.
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Cathlin Foy
FLARE Project Administrative Assistant
Phone: 608-263-1564
Email:
cjfoy@wisc.edu
Cathlin Foy provides administrative support to the FLARE project and the WIDA Research team. This includes organizing meetings and Professional Development institutes, completing travel and consultant reimbursements for staff and FLARE partners, and serving as the primary liaison to WCER for financial services.
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Dr. Rosalie Grant is a WIDA researcher at WCER. She received her Ph.D. and masters degree in science education from the University of Oklahoma. Her background includes being an educational measurement officer and school review officer for a state education department, and researching and evaluating programs for the Australian government.
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Dr. Naomi Lee's primary responsibility is to design and implement qualitative and mixed design research studies for WIDA at WCER.
In the past she has worked as an Instructor of Psychology at Georgetown University, a Bilingual Spanish-English Case Manager in North Carolina, and an ESL teacher in Germany.
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R
ita MacDonald has worked extensively in the field of content-language integration, using a systemic functional linguistics approach to build awareness of discipline-specific language and instructional capacity in elementary and high school content teachers, both in-service and pre-service.
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Daniella Molle, Ph.D.
Professional Development Researcher
CLIMBS Professional Development Team
Phone: 608-265-3768
Email:
molle@wisc.edu
Dr. Daniella Molle has been involved in the training of facilitators and development of materials related to the CLIMBS course that WIDA offers to its member states. She is interested in investigating what teachers of ELLs learn during professional development and how they put that knowledge into practice.
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Andy Reichert manages data for the WIDA Research Team. He also presents data to state educational agencies via the WIDA Data Dashboard. Before joining WIDA, he assisted school districts with analyzing NCLB and other standardized assessment data. Andy has a degree in Economics from the University of Wisconsin.
Narek Sahakyan is an Associate Researcher assisting the Research Director on statistical and econometric issues. Narek's current research interests include time-series and panel data analysis, value-added models and statistical benchmarking.
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Kristopher Stewart assists the Research Director in analyzing data related to aligning academic standards with assessments and serves as a research liaison to state and local stakeholders. He holds two Masters degrees: one in Teaching and one in Public Policy and Administration.
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Paula A. White, Ph.D.
FLARE Project Manager
Phone: 608-263-4353
Email:
pawhite1@wisc.edu
Dr. Paula A. White has served as researcher and evaluator on numerous projects at WCER. She also served as the Project Manager for the National Institute for Science Education (NISE).
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