Faculty receive 2023-24 WARF Named Professorships, Kellett Fellowships, Romnes Awards

Three WCER researchers among 34 awardees

June 13, 2023   |   By WCER Communications

Thirty-four UW–Madison faculty have been awarded fellowships from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education for 2023-24, including three researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research in the School of Education. The awardees span the four divisions on campus: arts and humanities, physical sciences, social sciences and biological sciences.

The awards are funded from the income produced by research-driven technology transfer generated by campus researchers and licensed by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

“These awards recognize our faculty research, academic and outreach successes and provide an opportunity for continued development of their outstanding research programs,” says Steve Ackerman, vice chancellor for research and graduate education. “I’m grateful that we are able to recognize invest in these faculty in this way, and I look forward to seeing the results of their imaginative use of these funds.”

H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowships

WCER researcher Brian Burt is among 17 faculty members to be honored with the H.I. Romnes Fellowships to recognize faculty with exceptional research contributions within their first six years from promotion to a tenured position. The award is named in recognition of the late WARF trustees president H.I. Romnes and comes with $60,000 that may be spent over five years.

Burt, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, also serves as director and chief research scientist for the Wisconsin’s Equity & Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB). He has received numerous awards recognizing his excellence in research including the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral
Fellowship and National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award. Through two strands (team-based research experiences, underrepresented students of color in engineering), Burt studies the experiences of graduate students and institutional policies and practices that influence students’ pathways.

Kellett Mid-career Awards

Lesley Bartlett, professor and chair of SoE’s Department of Educational Policy Studies, is one of 12 faculty who have been honored with Kellett Mid-Career Awards to support those promoted to tenured positions seven to 20 years ago who have made key research contributions in their fields. The award, named for the late William R. Kellett, a former president of the WARF board of trustees and president of Kimberly-Clark Corporation, provides support and encouragement to faculty at a critical stage of their careers and comes with $75,000 to be spent over five years.

An anthropologist by training who works in the field of International and Comparative Education, Bartlett does research in multilingual literacy studies, migration and educator professional development; she has also written extensively about ethnographic and comparative case study research methods. She is the author or co-author of nine books, including Humanizing Education for Immigrant and Refugee Youth (2022) and Rethinking Case Study Research. From 2019-2021, Bartlett served as faculty director of the Institute for Regional and International Studies at University of Wisconsin–Madison; from 2020-2022, she co-edited Anthropology and Education Quarterly.

Also receiving a Kellett Mid-career Award is Mitch Nathan, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Learning Sciences in the Educational Psychology Department, and a Fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences. Nathan investigates the embodied nature of how people think, teach, learn and how to assess and model nonverbal forms of knowledge in mathematics and engineering.

Read about all 34 awardees here.