Faculty members are central to the School’s success as dedicated educators, groundbreaking researchers, and vital mentors to the next generation. We are committed to recruiting top academics with diverse backgrounds who are dedicated to scholarship, teaching, and service that embraces and engages the full measure of the diversity of our society. We are also making substantial new efforts to support faculty doing outstanding work by committing significant resources over the next decade to a new faculty fellowship program. These new fellowships provide flexible funding over five years to further a faculty member’s research and scholarship. We announced the first nine fellows in the summer of 2020, with even more to be awarded by 2030. We similarly anticipate establishing new professorships and chairs through Impact 2030.
Meet our Fellows
David Bell
Position title: Associate Professor, Department of Kinesiology, Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation
Bell teaches in the Athletic Training program and serves as the director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory. His research focuses on identifying risk factors for musculoskeletal injuries, with a special focus on sport specialization in children.
Stephanie Budge
Position title: Associate Professor, Department of Counseling Psychology
Budge’s (she/her) research focuses on emotional and coping processes for transgender and nonbinary (TNB) youth and adults, with an emphasis on wellness. She also conducts research on the effectiveness of medical and psychotherapeutic treatments for TNB clients. She is particularly interested in understanding how to address oppression in the context of psychotherapy.
Helen Lee
Position title: Associate Professor, Art Department. Helen Burish Faculty Fellowship
As an artist, Lee examines the morphological nature of language. She is interested in how language inherently changes — over time, across cultures, and in physical form. Lee reifies her bilingual experience as a second generation Chinese-American in a fluid material that similarly embodies a state of flux. Lee states, “I write in glass, which is to say that I write in light, and I write in shadow.”
Percival Matthews
Position title: Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology
Matthews studies how people think about mathematics with two primary goals: 1) to understand how basic human abilities (like memory and perception) can support math; and 2) to use this basic knowledge to help improve teaching techniques to impact the learning of everyday children. He currently focuses on how people understand fractions and the equals sign.
Andrea Ruppar
Position title: Associate Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education
Ruppar’s research focuses on equity and inclusion for students with extensive support needs (who are typically labeled with intellectual disability, autism, or multiple disabilities). Her work particularly centers on teachers, and how their decisions affect students’ educational opportunities and outcomes. Most recently, Ruppar has been examining how ableism — discriminatory assumptions about individuals with disabilities — might affect teachers’ decisions and students’ experiences in school.
Rosemary S. Russ
Position title: Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Ann Wallace Faculty Fellowship
Russ examines how teachers and learners conceptualize knowledge and learning across a variety of contexts. Her work assumes the types of knowledge people use during sensemaking about the world depends critically on how they understand themselves as learners (or not). In doing so, she expands traditional notions of who counts as learners and what counts as learning.
Chris Walker
Position title: Professor, Dance Department
Walker is a multi-hyphenate contemporary dance and performance artist. Rooted in “Resistance Aesthetics,” Walker’s work draws upon the danced rituals, mas traditions, and embodied performance history of the African diaspora. The founding artistic director of OMAI/First Wave, Walker developed the First Wave Process. His research intersects dance choreography for the concert stage with collaborations with visual and performance artists for museum, alternate spaces, professional theatre, and video/film.
