At the start of the new academic year, Teachers College continues its tradition of academic excellence and innovation by announcing the latest faculty members to receive senior lecturer positions, tenure and full professorships.
Newly Tenured
Tyler Watts, Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology, has dedicated his research to studying the long term effects of educational interventions. Through his research, Watts attempts to understand whether impacts on early cognitive and social-emotional skills lead to long-lasting changes in children's developmental trajectories.
Watts has published more than 30 articles and book chapters, and his research is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Institute of Education Sciences. His work has been published in journals such as Child Development, Psychological Science, Educational Researcher, American Psychologist and Science. His research on the long-term development of self-regulation has been featured in The Atlantic, Vox, Forbes and NPR. In addition to his scholarship, Watts is a dedicated mentor to graduate students at TC, and he has fostered partnerships in the local community to provide mentoring to first-generation college students.
Full Professorships
Daniel Fienup, Professor of Psychology and Education, is interested in educational performance, using applied behavior analysis to determine what instructional variables and strategies lead to positive educational outcomes. He conducts and mentors research on educational interventions for children from birth to elementary school, including at-risk children and children with disabilities. He is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and a former Associate Editor at the Journal of Behavioral Education and The Analysis of Verbal Behavior.
He also serves on the Licensed Behavior Analyst New York state board and is a past board member of the New York State Association for Behavior Analysis. Dr. Fienup was the 2022 recipient of the Fred S. Keller Behavioral Education award from Division 25 (behavior analysis) of the American Psychological Association.
Benjamin J. Lovett, Professor of Psychology and Education, is Director of the School Psychology Ph.D. program, Senior Research Scientist at the Education for Persistence and Innovation Center (EPIC), and a licensed psychologist in New York State. Lovett’s current research centers on disability diagnosis, the efficacy of testing accommodations, and the impact of test anxiety as well as ways to manage it. He is co-Primary Investigator of a new Institute of Education Sciences-funded grant on students’ use of accommodations on NAEP math assessments.
Lovett is the author of over 100 publications including three books, such as Practical Psychometrics, a uniquely accessible practitioner-oriented guide to the science behind diagnostic testing. In addition to serving as a consultant to schools and testing agencies, Lovett also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment and the Journal of Attention Disorders.
Sonali Rajan, Professor of Health Education, is passionate about researching and developing evidence-based strategies to reduce gun violence that prioritize the health, safety and wellbeing of children. She is the inaugural President of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, the first professional society that is advancing the rapidly growing field of gun violence prevention. Rajan also holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and is Co-Director of the CDC-funded Columbia Center for Injury Science and Prevention.
An expert in school violence prevention, Rajan’s research has been regularly featured in major media outlets such as The Atlantic, NPR, and the Associated Press. She is currently co-leading two national studies on school gun violence prevention, funded by the National Institute of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Michelle Troche, Professor of Speech and Language Pathology, is committed to improving health outcomes and quality of life for people with swallowing and cough disorders through her research. Troche, Director of the Communications Sciences and Disorders program, is currently leading a National Institute of Health-funded clinical trial which seeks to expand access to life-saving treatments by comparing telehealth and in-person treatment for Parkinson’s patients with swallowing and cough disorders.
A licensed speech language pathologist, Troche serves as the Director of TC’s Laboratory for the Study of Upper Airway Dysfunction. Her research has been funded by the NIH, Michael J. Fox Foundation, National Ataxia Foundation, and the CurePSP foundation. She has published more than 90 articles and book chapters and in 2023 she was named an American Speech Language and Hearing Association Fellow, in recognition of her professional achievements.
For Nicholas Wasserman, Professor of Mathematics Education, secondary teacher education is at the center of his research, with a special interest in teachers’ mathematical preparation through their university coursework. Through the support of a prestigious Fulbright award, Wasserman worked with secondary teacher education programs at two Chilean universities to further this research and help redesign their programs. Wasserman, a former high school mathematics teacher in Austin and New York City, also investigates the use of technology as a teaching and learning tool.
Wasserman is the writer and editor of four books and has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He holds a leadership position in the Mathematical Association of America’s Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education community and also serves on several editorial boards, including the Journal of Mathematical Behavior and as board chair for the Journal of Mathematics Education at Teachers College.
Randi L. Wolf, Ella McCollum Vahlteich Professor of Human Nutrition, focuses on celiac disease in her research, working with the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University to better understand how gluten-free diets influence quality of life for people with celiac disease. Director of the Nutrition program, Wolf is a nutritional epidemiologist developing behavioral interventions promoting underutilized existing dietary recommendations, understanding determinants of dietary behavior change, and developing and testing novel diet assessment tools that better assess early childhood caries, for example.
Wolf joined TC in 2000, and received her Master of Public Health in Epidemiology and Ph.D in Nutritional Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. Along with Dr. Benjamin Lebwohl at the Celiac Disease Center, Wolf is co-principal investigator of a 5-year NIH clinical trial testing the effect of remote dietitian follow-up and technology in the management of celiac disease.
Senior Lecturers
Maria Hartman, Senior Lecturer, is dedicated to preparing future teachers of deaf and hard of hearing children to work in schools, clinics and agencies in New York City and around the world. Director of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Program and a TC alum, Hartman (Ph.D. ’15, M.A. ’86) was an instructor at the Saint Francis de Sales Schools for the Deaf in Brooklyn for 12 years and joined Teacher College as an adjunct in 1992.
Her current scholarship explores achievement outcomes and language and literacy development for children with hearing loss and she is a consultant to numerous schools for deaf and hard of hearing students around the U.S.
Amanda Mazin, Senior Lecturer and Practicum Coordinator in the Intellectual Disabilities/Autism program, is a board-certified behavior analyst and special education teacher with more than 20 years of experience working with individuals with disabilities and their families. Her practice is focused on teacher education, with an emphasis on behavioral and curriculum modification. Mazin has shared her decades of expertise with high needs school districts and private companies as a consultant.
Prior to joining TC in 2018, Mazin served as Associate Professor at St. Thomas Aquinas College. As a scholar, Mazin’s research focuses on effective models of teacher education in the areas of classroom and curriculum modification to best meet the needs of neurodivergent learners.