Katherine M. Kasten Doctoral Advising and Mentoring Award

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. 

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 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.