"Alumni Updates" highlights career achievements by College of Education alumni.
— Catharine Biddle, associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Maine, who received a doctorate in educational leadership from Penn State, was honored by the National Rural Education Association with the 2021 Best Research Award. The award was in recognition of the Beyond Crisis Schooling Project that Biddle conducted with Maria Frankland, a lecturer of educational leadership at the University of Maine.
— The Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES) has named Qu Chen as its first Emerging Leader Fellow in conjunction with the ACES-CACREP Intern and Fellows Program. Chen, an assistant professor at Southern Connecticut State University, earned her doctorate in counselor education in the Penn State College of Education.
— Sarah Nathel Douglas, who received her doctorate in special education from Penn State in 2011 and is now an associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Michigan State University, has developed Supporting Paraeducators: Successful Systems & Strategies for Admins and Teachers. This fully online, on-demand program designed for special education teachers, special education administrators, and building/district administrators provides evergreen strategies to help enhance the support provided to paraeducators.
— Becki Maurio (formerly Becki Harshman), who graduated from the College of Education in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education, Spanish, was recently promoted to associate professor at Carroll Community College in Westminster, Maryland. Her promotion project, now in its fourth year, was to develop a professional learning community for faculty and student affairs staff, focused on intercultural teaching and learning.
Did you get a new job, celebrate a career milestone, get a promotion or award, recently retire, or have other career-related news to share? If so, we want to hear from you. Email us at edrelations@psu.edu with your name, information about your achievement, and the degree(s) you earned and year(s) of graduation from the Penn State College of Education.