Jill V. Hamm, the William C. Friday Distinguished Professor, will become interim dean of the UNC School of Education, effective May 15. President J. Christopher Clemens made the announcement at a full faculty meeting on April 30th.
In addition to his role as a faculty member, Hamm also serves as associate dean for research and faculty development.
Ham will assume leadership responsibilities ahead of the retirement of Fuad Abd El Khalik, who will leave Carolina to become provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on June 30. and overlap to ensure a seamless transition.
Hamm has been a faculty member in Applied Developmental Sciences at the University of Carolina since 1999. As associate dean for research and faculty development, a role created in 2017 that Ham has held since then, she took the lead in increasing the school's annual research spending from 2017 to 2017. I have fulfilled my role. In 2016 she made $6.2 million and in 2023 she made $22.2 million. This growth has significantly expanded Carolina's ability to better serve people in North Carolina and beyond, especially students and educators. Under her leadership, the school increased its research capabilities and expanded its pipeline by creating several pre-award and post-award staff positions.
Hamm's research interests center on the role of peer relationships in early adolescence's social, behavioral, and academic adjustment, as well as successful school adjustment. She translates her research findings about the academic and social processes that naturally occur in schools into the development and testing of professional learning experiences designed to help middle school and high school teachers create collaborative classroom and school environments. applied to. She is the author or co-author of over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and her 16 handbooks, books, and book chapters. Mr. Ham has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on research projects that have received funding totaling over $18 million.
Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences, the William T. Grant Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. She is currently awarding a $1.5 million NSF-funded Collaborative Research Grant (CASCADE, or Collaborative Activities in STEM Careers for Youth Engagement) to a Chapel Hill-based company that improves STEM education efforts through research. It is co-led by Horizon Research Inc.
Hamm is a former associate editor of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology and has served on the editorial boards of JADP and the Journal of Educational Psychology. She previously directed the Social Development Intervention Research Program at the Center for Developmental Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Hamm earned a PhD and a Master of Science in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed a postdoctoral fellowship through the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
With Ham serving as interim dean, McMichael Professor Jeffrey A. Green will assume the role of interim associate dean for research and faculty development on May 15.
Mr. Green served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Director of Graduate Studies for two and a half years until July 1, 2020. He has been a faculty member at the University of Maryland since 2007 after receiving his doctorate in educational psychology. His research leverages the science of learning to help people become more important consumers and producers of information, especially in online and technological environments.
Read more about Ham and Green.