The planning team for the trip includes Professor Janet Lawrence, Master’s Program Coordinator Katie Madden, and doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar Sergio Celis Guzman. In addition, Professor Stephen DesJardins will also be traveling with the group. The support of Director Michael Bastedo, Melinda Richardson, Linda Rayle, and many others have made this opportunity possible.

Please see below for brief biographies of the planning team members:

Janet Lawrence, PhD

Janet H. Lawrence teaches courses related to academic affairs in higher education and international and comparative postsecondary education. Her current research focuses on university professors and includes recent inquiries into the factors that lead international faculty in STEM fields to stay or leave their universities, faculty perceptions of organizational politics and how they affect decisions to engage in shared governance, professors’ organizational commitment and participation in campus service, and features of campuses that foster and inhibit faculty engagement in interdisciplinary research. In addition to her articles, she coauthored Faculty at Work (Johns Hopkins University Press) with Robert Blackburn in which they proposed and tested a social-cognitive model of faculty motivation to engage in teaching, research and service. Lawrence has held elected offices in major national educational associations (AERA and ASHE) and has served as an associate dean of the School of Education and Director of the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. She received her BS in Education from Tufts University, MS in Education from Smith College, and PhD in Education with a concentration in social psychology from the University of Michigan.

Katherine Madden, PhD

Katherine (Katie) Madden completed her master’s degree in Higher Education from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign before continuing on to Michigan State University, where she completed her PhD in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education (HALE) in 2010. Katie’s research interests include disability in higher education, student identity development, and also living-learning communities. She is a past chairperson for the ACPA Standing Committee on Disability.

Katie has participated in five study abroad opportunities including at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate level. In addition to student exchanges, study tours, and more traditionally-structured learning experiences abroad, she also conducted an independent study in order to learn more about the experience of college students with visual disabilities in Mumbai, India. Katie has 7 years of full-time professional experience working in residence life, during which time she worked closely with master’s students in student affairs. Katie also has experience working with the M-Bio program at the University of Michigan, where she continued her work with first-year students in transition. She joined the CSHPE staff team in September 2012 as the Coordinator for Master’s Program Activities.

Sergio Celis Guzman

Sergio Celis is a doctoral candidate in higher education. His research focuses on teaching and learning in STEM, including topics such as curricular change, faculty work, faculty teaching, and international partnerships. His dissertation investigates the influences of external actors on the engineering curriculum by analyzing the case of entrepreneurship education in engineering. Sergio holds a B.Sc. and a professional degree in industrial engineering from the Universidad de Chile.