Katherine M. Kasten Doctoral Advising and Mentoring Award
This award seeks to acknowledge Dr. Katherine M. Kasten’s legacy and highlights her innovative, excellent, and effective advising and mentoring over the years. Dr. Katherine Kasten , fondly known as Kathe, joined UNF in 1988, and later served as dean of the College of Education and Human Services at UNF from 1995 to August 2004.
Each year the doctoral program in Educational Leadership will recognize a faculty member with this award. In addition, the Thomas A. Mulkeen Dissertation Award is given annually to a student whose dissertation best exemplifies practice-centered inquiry.
2023-2024 Award Winner, Dr. Daniel Dinsmore
Dr. Dinsmore started teaching in the UNF doctoral program in the Spring of 2013 and has been teaching Quantitative Research Methods and Learning and Instruction Across the Lifespan. Since 2015 he has served as a chair on 12 completed dissertations so far and an additional three completed serving as a co-chair. He has advised students in multiple disciplines including physical therapy, applied behavior analysis, PK-16 school-based learning and assessment, and faculty research productivity. Dan has been fortunate in that his students have embodied strong collaborative spirits that have spawned five (and counting!) co-authored peer-reviewed journal articles with his students along with numerous conference presentations and five Mulkeen Dissertation Award winners. Mentoring and advising doctoral students continues to be one of the most joyous parts of his job and he hopes to continue to work with curious students who want to contribute to generalizable knowledge and make people’s lives better.
2022-2023 Award Winner, Dr. Amanda Pascale
Dr. Amanda Pascale has been a member of the Educational Leadership doctoral teaching faculty since 2014. During that time she has taught various research methods for the program, including (a) introduction to research methods in education (b) introduction to quantitative methods, and (c) seminar in advanced research methods. Dr. Pascale is a dedicated mentor and advisor. While at UNF she has successfully chaired 13 student committees and has served on 15 additional committees in the role of methodologist and/or higher education leadership content expert.
Dr. Pascale builds long standing connections with her students working with them to publish and present their work after dissertation completion. She encourages students to use their research to develop data-driven recommendations for practice to improve higher education.
2020-2021 Award Winner, Dr. Chris Janson
Dr. Chris Janson has been a faculty member at UNF since 2007. In 2020 he was selected as the UNF Presidential Diversity & Inclusion Award Winner, and he received an Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in 2012. A common focus of his teaching, scholarship, and service is supporting the individual and collective gifts of students and communities of color.
During his tenure at UNF, Dr. Janson has mentored many graduate students. He has chaired 13 Ed.D. dissertation committees, co-chaired 4 others, served as the methodologist on 4 others, and served as a committee member on 9 more. Dr. Janson has also served on external committees at two other universities.
Dr. Janson is purposeful about supporting scholars from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Half of all the dissertation committees on which he has served at UNF have been for students of color, 10 of whom he supported as either chair or co-chair.
2019-2020 Award Winner, Dr. Anne Swanson
Dr. Anne Swanson is the 2019-2020 inaugural winner of the Katherine M. Kasten Doctoral Advising and Mentoring Award. Swanson taught research foundation courses in the program and advised and mentored countless first semester doctoral students over the past 5 years. She also successfully chaired 8 doctoral dissertations and served on 10 other dissertation committees between Fall 2015 and Summer 2020. In 2017, one of her advisees, Dr. Travis Henderson, was awarded the Thomas A. Mulkeen Dissertation Award, given annually to the student whose dissertation best exemplifies practice-centered inquiry. Dr. Swanson earned her doctoral degree in Educational Leadership, Administration, and Supervision from Loyola University in Chicago and was an assistant superintendent for Woodland School District, in Illinois before coming to UNF.
Dr. Katherine M. Kasten
Dr. Katherine M. Kasten lead the development of UNF’s first doctoral program, an EdD in Educational leadership. Kathe's reputation for collaborative leadership and student-centered programming helped put the UNF EdD program on the map. During her tenure at UNF, Kasten chaired 45 dissertation committees. Furthermore, nine of her students were awarded the Thomas A. Mulkeen Dissertation Award.
She served as principal investigator or consultant on several urban initiatives, including the college’s urban professional development schools, a multi-year project to support under-prepared beginning teachers in urban schools; and the Jacksonville Urban Systemic Initiative, a six-year project funded through a grant to Duval County Public Schools from the National Science Foundation. She authored/coauthored several articles and book chapters in the areas of educational leadership and teacher preparation and two books of case studies in educational leadership. Dr. Kasten earned her doctorate in educational administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.