Welcome

I am a doctoral student in Educational Leadership at Penn State’s Department of Education Policy Studies. My research interests include ethical leadership, the meaningful involvement of youth in decision-making in school and community decision-making, and the interconnected well-being of schools and their communities, particularly in rural areas. At Penn State, I have worked with numerous faculty members as a graduate research assistant on projects involving program evaluation, qualitative data collection, secondary data analysis, and mixed methods research. Additionally, from 2010-2012, I served as the managing editor for the Journal of Research in Rural Education (http://jrre.psu.edu), an open-access journal located here at Penn State.

Before I became a graduate student, I was the Executive Director of the Nanubhai Education Foundation (http://www.nanubhai.org), a 501c3 organization working in Gujarat, India on “Inspiring Students, Empowering Teachers, and Transforming Rural Classrooms”.  Prior to serving as Nanubhai’s Executive Director, I was also a high-school educator in rural India and a middle-school educator in South Boston (with the national non-profit Citizen Schools)

To learn more about my experience teaching in rural India through humorous essays and letters home, visit my blog: http://cat-in-india.blogspot.com