Teachers College Faculty Tenured in 2023
Three Teachers College professors joined Columbia's tenured faculty in 2023, including KerryAnn O’Meara, TC's new Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost and Dean. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work, and great promise for continued contributions at the forefront of their fields.
KerryAnn O’Meara
KerryAnn O’Meara, who is Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost and Dean of Teachers College, is an internationally renowned scholar and academic leader who works to identify and test strategies to recruit and retain a diverse faculty in higher education.
Her research draws on organizational behavior, higher education research, and behavioral economics in its examinations of faculty careers and academic rewards systems. Using a range of methods, including longitudinal approaches, randomized control trials, ethnography, and interviews, O’Meara identifies practices that support and limit the full participation of women and minoritized faculty, from hiring through development and workload.
O’Meara earned her PhD from the University of Maryland before holding appointments at the University of Massachusetts, and later the University of Maryland, where she also directed institution-wide efforts to invest in the hiring, professional growth, retention, and advancement of diverse faculty. She came to Teachers College in 2023 to serve as Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost, and Dean, as well as Professor of Higher Education.
Read KerryAnn O’Meara’s Faculty Profile
Ezekiel Dixon-Roman
Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, Professor of Critical Race, Media and Educational Studies, studies race, power, and quantification in education and algorithmic governance. His research makes cultural and critical theoretical interventions toward rethinking and reconceptualizing the technologies and practices of quantification as mediums and agencies of systems of sociopolitical relations whereby race and other assemblages of difference are byproducts. These technologies include from educational testing to data science and artificial intelligence.
Through engagement with philosophy and Black radical thought, he seeks to develop alternative modes of inquiry and practices of quantification that might enable critical space for reconstituting sociopolitical relations and the movement and flow of social life. He has published widely in top-tier journals in education and cultural studies.
Dixon-Román earned his PhD from Fordham University, conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University, and held appointments at University of Pennsylvania before joining Teachers College’s tenured faculty in 2023.
Ezekiel Dixon-Roman's Faculty Profile
Alex Eble
Associate Professor of Economics and Education, Teachers College
Alex Eble, Associate Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, is an applied microeconomist who aims to better understand the sources of global inequality in education and economic outcomes, and to help identify the best policy options for reducing this inequality.
His primary focus is the economics of education in the developing world. Drawing on his fieldwork in Asia and Africa, Eble’s research aims to identify, evaluate, and study the scalability of policy options to raise learning levels, particularly among the least fortunate.
Eble’s second research stream focuses on how children form beliefs about their own ability, and how this affects their development of knowledge and skills. In this area, Eble has used statistical analyses and artificial intelligence tools to examine representation of gender and race in children’s literature, shedding light on numerous patterns that suggest implicit bias, including underrepresentation of people of color and a tendency for the most influential books to depict people of color with lighter skin.
Eble obtained his PhD from Brown University before joining the Teachers College faculty in 2016, earning tenure in 2023.
Patrick Schmidt, Professor of Music and Music Education, is an internationally recognized voice in the field of critical pedagogy, who focuses on social justice and policy in music education. He is leader and activist in policy development and application as it relates to arts education, especially music education.
Schmidt is especially interested in exploring policy and efforts to “decolonize” music education and curriculum, making it more inclusive and dispelling the notion that excellence is mutually exclusive from equity. Schmidt has published widely, including six books and over 50-peer reviewed book chapters and journal publications in the fields of education and arts policy.
Schmidt earned his PhD in from Temple University and held appointments at the Westminster Choir College of Rider University, the School of Music at Florida International University, and the University of Western Ontario before joining the Teachers College faculty in 2022 and receiving tenure in 2023.
Patrick Schmidt’s Faculty Profile