EdD in Organizational Leadership Faculty
Ebony Cain, PhD
Associate Professor of Education
Prior to joining GSEP, Dr. Cain served as a nonprofit leader building programs that focus attention and services on the educational inequity and academic advancement of at-risk and low-income students and communities. She previously taught at the University of Southern California. Additionally, Dr. Cain worked within urban schools as they implemented and created instructional and structural programs promoting greater equity, access, and choice for students of modest means.
Anthony Collatos, PhD
Professor of Education
Dr. Collatos is a research associate with UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access and the University of California All Campus Consortium on Racial Diversity (UC/ACCORD). His research involves the Futures Project, an eight-year longitudinal study that examined alternative pathways for first-generation urban youth to more effectively navigate the K–16 educational pipeline. Dr. Collatos is also the director of the Urban Parent/ Teacher Education Collaborative and the Youth and Empowerment Research Seminar Program.
Reyna García Ramos, PhD
Professor of Education
Dr. García Ramos is a professor of education and director of the Teacher Preparation Program (TPP) at Pepperdine University. She lends leadership to the undergraduate and graduate preservice teacher pathways and directs the MAT program at GSEP.
Dr. García Ramos teaches across several programs in the Education Division. Her research addresses the academic challenges of emergent bilinguals in California's public school system. She established university-school partnerships, allowing preservice teachers to obtain learning experiences with emergent bilinguals in local schools.
Eric Hamilton, PhD
Jan and Robert Davidson Endowed Professor of Education and Technology
Dr. Eric Hamilton is a learning scientist and technologist who directs the Asset-Based Learning Environments project, a multiyear research effort funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). His current NSF effort involves learners from six countries collaborating in digital makerspace activities and the study of identity formation in that process.
He has directed numerous research projects funded by NSF, the Department of Education, the US State Department, and the Microsoft Research Foundation since coming to GSEP. He is currently heavily involved in the growing international research community applying principles of quantitative ethnography, and he carries out research efforts separate from NSF projects focusing on depolarizing political discourse.
Samaa Haniya, EdD & PhD
Assistant Professor
Dr. Samaa Haniya has many years of experience designing, implementing, evaluating, and researching e-learning practices both in small and large-scale learning environments, such as MOOCs. Her research interests focus on humanizing education practices through digital transformation and innovative pedagogies to foster mastery learning for all learners.
To achieve this goal, she examines user experience, instructional models, and learning behaviors taking place in different online courses and e-learning platforms in relation to learner differences. Her research has been published in well-known national and international journals, books, and conference proceedings, such as ACM, E-Learning and Digital Media, Routledge, and IGI Global.
Parham Holakouee
Visiting Professor
Parham Holakouee is a Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology. He has worked as a law and policy advisor to several governments and as a strategic advisor to prominent non-profit multinational organizations. Through these advisory roles, he has worked on legal and regulatory reforms to stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation-focused economic growth. He has also developed educational curricula targeting better alignment between what is taught in schools and what is demanded by the economy of the future.
Martine Jago, PhD
Professor of Education
Dr. Jago was awarded a three-year full-time research scholarship for her doctoral study which explored the impact of policy on practice in terms of social change and curriculum innovation, and a two-year grant from the European Union for the training and mobility of young researchers. Until 1995, she was the vice principal of a public elementary school in England. She has been a high school teacher of foreign languages in Germany and California, and an Assistant Professor in education at Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Alaska. In 2001, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce in London for her contribution to language education.
Steve Kirnon, EdD
Visiting Faculty
Dr. Kirnon has over 30 years of operational experience in biomedical and medical device organizations. Dr. Kirnon is currently Co-Founder and CEO of Shawshank Therapeutics, Inc. Since January 2009, he has served as the Co-founder and CEO of PharmaPlan LLC and Vitavis Laboratories Inc, which was sold to Nestle Health Sciences in 2017.
Dr Kirnon was previously the President and Chief Executive Officer of Pepgen Corporation, a biopharmaceutical company based in Alameda, CA, specializing in autoimmune diseases. He was formerly the President and CEO of Target Protein Technologies, Inc., a pharmaceutical company based in San Diego and specializing in the development of pharmaceutical compounds targeted to specific tissues and organs of the human body.
Seung Lee, PhD
Assistant Professor of Education
Dr. Lee's research focuses on collaborative learning, online interactions, socio-cognitive processes and creativity among K-12 students, particularly in the context of STEM education. He is currently involved in two studies funded by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Lee's methodological expertise is in quantitative ethnography and epistemic network analysis (ENA), which apply statistical and visualization techniques to model the structure of connections in the data. He served as the Program Committee Co-chair for the 2020 International Conference on Quantitative Ethnography. His previous professional experiences include policy research and program management roles with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), International Organization for Migration (IOM), and nonprofit foundations in Korea and the U.S.
Doug Leigh, PhD
Professor
Dr. Doug Leigh earned his PhD in instructional systems from Florida State University, where he served as a technical director of projects with various local, state, and federal agencies. His current research, publishing, and speaking engagements concern psychometrics, machine learning, and science communication. He is co-editor of The Handbook of Selecting and Implementing Performance Interventions (Wiley, 2010) and coauthor of The Assessment Book (HRD Press, 2008), Strategic Planning for Success (Jossey-Bass, 2003) and Useful Educational Results (Proactive Publishing, 2001).
Gabriella Miramontes, EdD
Assistant Clinical Professor
Dr. Gabriella Miramontes is a passionate human capacity developer, leadership advocate, and project management professional; bringing non-profit experience in strategy, leadership development, organizational effectiveness, portfolio management to ECE-K12, and higher education. She has over 20 years of experience working in the non-profit, education consulting arena and has demonstrated success in driving high-stakes project execution, building collaborative partnerships and leadership advisement, assessment management, and training development.
Jennifer Miyake-Trapp, EdD
Associate Professor of Education
Dr. Miyake-Trapp has over a decade of experience in K-12 public schools. She has taught middle school and continuation high school in both urban and suburban settings, coached new teachers, and designed professional development workshops focused on meeting the needs of linguistically and ethnically diverse learners. Her primary interests center on teacher preparation for urban contexts, culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy, elementary and secondary curriculum and instruction, project-based learning, and teacher reflection. Other areas of interest include second language acquisition and online learning.
Kfir Mordechay, PhD
Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy
Dr. Kfir Mordechay’s research focuses on how social, demographic, and spatial factors contribute to the formation of racial and economic inequalities. His current research is funded by a grant from the Spencer Foundation and explores the relationship between residential and school segregation in gentrifying neighborhoods across California.
Dr. Mordechay’s scholarship has been published in journals such as Educational Policy, The American Journal of Education, Urban Education, and Teachers College Record. His work has been featured and cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR, among others. In addition to his scholarly work, Mordechay has served as an expert consultant for the U.S. Department of Education and other organizations.
Kent Rhodes, EdD
Clinical Professor
Dr. Kent Rhodes brings senior executive experience to equipping students for lives of purpose, service, and leadership with Pepperdine’s doctoral and executive graduate programs. In addition to his role with GSEP, he serves as Practitioner Faculty with the Graziadio Business School’s Master of Science in Organization Development and Master of Science in Family Enterprise.
Abraham Song, PhD
Assistant Professor
Dr. Song teaches courses on research methods and public policy. His current research examines state business incentives and digital platforms. In one stream of research, he conducts a program evaluation of state business incentives. In another stream of research, he studies the emergence of digital platforms and their implications for entrepreneurship and policy. Dr. Song is a research affiliate at the Milken Institute's Center for Regional Economics and California, conducting research to inform and activate innovative economic and policy solutions to drive job creation and industry expansion.
Paul Sparks, PhD
Associate Professor
Dr. Sparks leads technology courses in the doctoral and master's programs at Pepperdine. Previously, he was the director of training at Epoch Internet, where he developed its curriculum. Dr. Sparks was also an educational technologist and information systems specialist for Rockwell International. He was previously a high school and adult education instructor in the Whittier Union High School District.
Ricardo Vigil, EdD
Professor
Dr. Vigil serves as the director of field experience for the teacher preparation program at GSEP. Previously, he taught as a secondary social studies instructor and was a K-12 administrator and adjunct professor. Dr. Vigil uses his background knowledge of K-12 education to maintain and develop partnerships with schools in the greater Los Angeles area. He currently teaches clinical courses, secondary methods, and instructional design and enjoys guiding and developing new educators as they journey through their programs and into their careers. In 2011, Dr. Vigil was a finalist nominee for dissertation of the year at the University of Southern California, and other research interests include technology and teacher feedback, and instruction. Dr. Vigil is a passionate supporter of STEM, urban education, and innovative schools.
Amanda Wickramasinghe, PhD
Visiting Professor
Amanda Wickramasinghe is a scholar-practitioner. She has been in education for more than a decade in multiple industries. Additionally, she has been teaching in graduate programs for Global Leadership, Organizational Leadership, Human Resources Management, and International Studies. She oversees education initiatives for ERA Brokers and collaborates with international organizations for global assignments for Wickra Consulting. Moreover, she has designed courses for the University of Maine, Presque Isle, and National University. Amanda is an advisor on multiple international outreach and research committees, creating strategic partnerships.
Kevin Wong, PhD
Associate Professor of Education
Dr. Kevin M. Wong is an Associate Professor of Education and Chair of the MA in TESOL Program in the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University. Dr. Wong draws from his biracial, multilingual upbringing in Hong Kong to examine language learning among children, with a particular interest in new language learning and heritage language maintenance. As a former elementary public school teacher, Dr. Wong seeks educational equity for linguistically and culturally diverse students in Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 12 contexts.