Deans Diversity Postdoctoral Fellows and QualLab Graduate Student Board members will be introducing each speaker and moderating the keynote and workshop Q&As. Read more about our volunteers below.
Jasmine Abukar (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University, where she specializes in Multicultural and Equity Studies in Education. She works as both a Graduate Teaching Associate and Graduate Research Associate within the College of Education and Human Ecology. Jasmine’s research highlights critical, culturally based qualitative methods, and marginalized students’ resistance of oppression within higher education. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the possibilities of rest as a form of resistance among Women of Color PhD students.
Dr. e alexander (they/them) has worked in higher education for a decade – to include research in praxis, and college access, service-learning and student leadership programs. They have also worked in human services, serving urban and rural communities using identity-based and restorative interventions. Through queer, Black existentialist, Trans-Atlantic/Indigenous, anticolonial, and womxnist frameworks, e’s scholarship interrogates academia as a global neocolonial project and industry. It also explores embodiment in education scholarship through therapeutic, cultural, spatial, and arts-based knowledge. e’s ongoing projects give attention to Black womxn with regards to professional socialization, promotion and tenure, spirituality, pedagogy in student leadership development, and bringing Black matriarchal knowledge into academic research and teaching.
Dr. Autumn Bermea (she/her/they/them) is a Dean’s Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Development and Family Science in the Department of Human Sciences. Her research focuses on intimate partner violence in queer relationships. She is a primarily qualitative researcher with a specialty in phenomenological and grounded theory methodologies.
Busra Ceviren (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Quantitative Research, Evaluation, and Measurement (QREM) program in the Department of Educational Studies, College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University. She is a graduate teaching associate in the same department and teaches Introduction to Educational Statistics labs. She also serves as a graduate research associate in the Office of Research, Innovation, and Collaboration (ORIC), College of Education and Human Ecology. Her current research focuses on data management practices of education researchers.
Lisa Combs, MS (she/her/hers), recently transitioned from her role as program coordinator in the Student Diversity and Multicultural Affairs Office at Loyola University Chicago to become a doctoral student at The Ohio State University in the higher education and student affairs program. Her research interests include identity interconnections, multiraciality in higher education, and Filipinx identity development. She received her BA from The Ohio State University and her MS from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Outside of her scholarly life, Lisa is a fitness instructor, loves watching TV, and eating desserts!
Chelsea Gilbert (she/her) is a scholar-activist who focuses her work on critical approaches to trauma in higher education. She is passionate about liberatory methodologies, transformative justice, and critical feminist leadership. She is currently pursuing her PhD at The Ohio State University; prior to this, she spent 8 years as a practitioner in diversity, inclusion, and equity roles in higher education, including as director of an LGBTQ+ center. She also serves as the Graduate Research Associate for QualLab and the Advanced Methods Institute.
Dr. Sonia Giron (she/her) is a Dean’s Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow. Her scholarship on adolescent social-emotional development and family relationships is motivated by the diverse immigrant community that raised her in the suburbs of DC, and a desire to uplift and honor her Central American family, community, and ancestors. She is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants and was a first-generation student at the University of Maryland (BA) and University of Missouri (MA; PhD). In her free time, she enjoys hiking, gardening, and live music.
Dr. Jerraco Johnson (he/him) is a Dean’s Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Kinesiology Program within the OSU Human Sciences Department. An overarching theme of his research is health disparities among young underserved children. A major emphasis of his research is on reducing and addressing ethnic/racial, gender, and socioeconomic related disparities for this population. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and Auburn University.
Myung-Jin Kim, MS. (she/her/hers) is an early childhood educator, educational activist, and PhD student of the Dramatic and Arts-based Research Teaching, and Learning (DARTL) program and a member of the EHE QualLab Graduate Student Board research team at the Ohio State University. She is passionate about supporting educators to create dialogic and humanizing teaching-and-learning environments for their learners. She was a PreK-K and EFL teacher for four years in South Korea. She currently teaches Korean American heritage language learners, adoptees, and their families for five years as a lead teacher in a community-based school located in central Ohio. She has taught pre- and in-service early childhood teachers to support using dramatic inquiry pedagogy as a graduate teaching associate. She also served as a university supervisor to early childhood teacher candidates at the Ohio State University.
Her research focuses on improvised and playful forms of drama as a medium of teaching and learning in K-12 and teacher education for emergent multilinguals. Her work is informed by sociocultural theory and dialogism.
Bakari Lumumba (he/him) is a dynamic higher education professional who is a third-year doctoral student in the higher education student affairs (HESA) program at The Ohio State University. He has a passion for diversified experiences in academic and student services with a passion for student success and development. Skilled in student engagement, academic advising, retention and success, community conduct and standards, student development, strategic planning, and supervision. His research interest are Pan-Africanism, Black misandry in higher education and the use of Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) as a construct to engage and combat anti-Black racism.
Dr. Allen Mallory (he/him) is a Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University in the Department of Human Sciences. Allen received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Human Development and Family Sciences where he was also a trainee at the University of Texas Population Research Center. Allen’s research takes an intersectional approach to understanding the health and well-being of sexual and gender minorities. Specifically, he studies how health disparities vary among and between sexual and gender minorities across multiple marginalized identities and the how the processes tied to multiple identities, such as discrimination, intersect to affect health.
Dr. Rhodesia McMillian (she/her) is an EHE Equity Post-Doc and QualLab’s NVivo expert. Utilizing critical methodologies and theories, she is a interdisciplinary scholar whose research bridges K-12 education reform law, education policy, elementary and secondary educational governance, special education law, and sociology. Dr. McMillian’s primary scholarship investigates how federal, state and local education policies impact the educational experiences of students of color and students with disabilities, as well as the ways in which educational disparities persist in k-12 public education.
Dr. Kristen Mills is a College of Education and Human Ecology Dean’s Diversity Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Educational Studies at The Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. in Ecological-Community Psychology from Michigan State University in 2019. Her program of research examines academic resilience and racial battle fatigue among racially and ethnically minoritized students, and the use of research evidence in education. Her research aims to strengthen practices and interventions that promote both academic success and well-being among traditionally underrepresented students. Her work is published in journals such as Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, Journal of Black Psychology, Evidence and Policy, Educational Research Review, and American Journal of Community Psychology.
Dr. Dinorah Sánchez Loza (she/hers/ella/elle/they) is a Dean’s Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the College of Education and Human Ecology whose scholarship is guided by one central question: What relationship exists between schools and how youth come to think and act politically? Dr. Sánchez Loza completed her doctoral studies in 2020 at the University of California, Berkeley in the Social Cultural Studies program in the Graduate School of Education where her work focused on critical social theories in education, settler colonialism and its resultant structuring of race, gender, and political/economic relations, and the teaching and learning of politics and civic engagement. A veteran educator, Dinorah taught ELA and Dramatic Arts for seven years in south east Los Angeles, taught various age groups during her time in Japan, provided professional development to teachers in the Dominican Republic, acted as supervisor to teacher-candidates in the Bay Area, and designed and facilitated a critical research camp with youth in Oakland. Her scholarship has been recognized by the Ford Foundation, The Women’s Place at OSU, as well as the Center for Right Wing Studies and the Institute of the Study of Social Issues at UC Berkeley.
Tessa Smith (she/her) is a first-year PhD student in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program at the Ohio State University. In her role as a Learning and Development Consultant in the Office of Student Life at Ohio State, Tess provides training and consultation on educationally-purposeful supervision and learning and development for student employees and their supervisors. Tess’s research interests include critical pedagogy, first generation student development, positive psychology, and mortality consciousness.
Shay Valley (they/them) is a first year student in the Higher Education and Student Affairs MA program and a full-time employee in the ESL Programs office in the College of Education and Human Ecology at the Ohio State University. They are also a member of the Graduate Student Board research team housed within EHE’s QualLab. They are passionate about qualitative research, and they plan to pursue a PhD in Higher Education after they receive their MA. Their research interests include transgender and gender non-conforming student experiences at higher education institutions, LGBTQ+ college students’ mental health, and graduate student socialization.
