Meet Our Team
Leadership
Dr. Michael Sweet
Dr. Michael Sweet
Director of Design and Integration
Dr. Sweet (he/him/his) earned his Ph.D. from University of Texas Austin in Educational Psychology. His research and professional work have centered on learning processes in student groups and he has published in Educational Psychology Review, Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Decision Sciences, Journal of Innovative Education, To Improve the Academy, and New Directions for Teaching and Learning. He was an invited guest editor for a special issue of Educational Psychology Review and was lead editor of the volume Team-Based Learning in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Group Work that Works to Generate Critical Thinking and Engagement.
Dr. Sweet presents nationally and internationally on critical thinking and team-based learning, served as the 2009-2010 President of the international Team-Based Learning Collaborative and 2014-2016 Executive Editor of Publications. Furthermore, the online resources he developed to support critical thinking instruction and team-based learning have achieved international adoption.
Dr. Sweet has taught classes in Learning and Motivation, Group Communication, Critical Thinking and in various internet and data networking topics.
Our Team
Kerianne Levesque
Kerianne Levesque
Administrative Assistant
Kerianne joined the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning through Research in fall 2022. In her role at CATLR, she performs work related to day-to-day office operations, communications/marketing, programming, event planning, and data management. Before joining CATLR, Kerianne provided administrative support for the Philanthropy division at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital.
Dr. Mary English
Dr. Mary English
Senior Associate Director
Dr. English earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from George Mason University. Her professional work has centered on instructional systems design for interactive multimedia training and online asynchronous education. Dr. English’s research focuses on teacher motivation and implementation fidelity issues related to PBL, as well as creating environments to support student self-regulated learning. She has presented nationally on these topics, and has been published in several journals, including the Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning. Dr. English is currently an advisory board member of the Advanced Manufacturing PBL project, which is an NSF-funded initiative of the New England Board of Higher Education. She is also an adjunct professor.
Prior to her career in higher education, Dr. English served in diverse teaching, consulting, and research roles in various private, non-profit, government, and educational institutions in the Washington, D.C. area. She has taught classes in student motivation, PBL, teaching online, applying user-centered design principles to courses, and implementing and evaluating learning technologies.
Dr. Suzanne Horwitz
Dr. Suzanne Horwitz
Research and Data Analyst
Dr. Horwitz joined CATLR as a Research and Data Analyst in December 2018. Prior to joining CATLR’s Research and Assessment team, Dr. Horwitz earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in Psychology and completed Postdoctoral Training at the Yale School of Management.
Her previous research examined people’s implicit, subconscious attitudes and how these subconscious attitudes shape behavior. Drawing from different areas within psychology, she has studied how social group attitudes develop during childhood, how social group attitudes affect interpersonal interactions, and how implicit attitudes shape consumer behaviors.
She has published her research in journals such as Developmental Science, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, Socius and PLoS ONE.
Dr. Gail Matthews-DeNatale
Dr. Gail Matthews-DeNatale
Senior Associate Director
Dr. Matthews-DeNatale earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University in Folklore with minors in Anthropology and American Studies. Her research focuses on engaging students as storytellers and creators within multimodal online learning contexts. She came to CATLR from Northeastern’s Graduate School of Education, College of Professional Studies, where as Associate Teaching Professor she founded and led the school’s eLearning and Instructional Design M.Ed. program, served as a doctoral thesis advisor, and chaired the Faculty Academic Council’s Academic Programs Committee. Prior to Northeastern, she held positions at Simmons College, George Mason University, and The University of South Carolina.
Gail was the recipient Northeastern University’s 2014 CPS Award for Teaching Excellence and the Sloan-C Online Learning Consortium’s 2013 Learning Effectiveness Award. She is a founding board member of the Association of Authentic, Experiential, Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL). From 2011-14 she led Northeastern’s involvement in Connect to Learning, a FIPSE-funded national network that developed the Catalyst for Learning framework of effective ePortfolio practice (http://c2l.mcnrc.org). In addition to authoring many publications, she provides editorial review for the Online Learning Journal and Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education.
Gail’s teaching experience includes the development and instruction of courses on models for learning design, open learning, oral history, digital storytelling, learning analytics concepts and theories, and how people learn.
Dr. Rachel Plews
Dr. Rachel Plews
Associate Director
Dr. Plews (she/her/hers) earned her Ed.D. in Adult Learning & Leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. She holds a M.Ed. in Teaching, Learning & Technology from Lehigh University. From 2015 to 2020, she worked in Switzerland at the Center for Teaching Support at the University of Teacher Education Vaud and in faculty development at the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne. She has also worked on projects and contributed to educational development programming for the University of Applied Sciences & Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO), the School of Management & Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Sommet Education, Glion Institute of Higher Education, Les Roches, and Cesar Ritz Colleges.
Dr. Plews’ areas of research interest include technology-enhanced learning, online learning, self-directed learning, and the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning. She has presented her work internationally at the International Consortium for Educational Development Bi-Annual Conference (ICED), the International Transformative Learning Conference, the European Association for Practitioner Research on Improving Learning (EAPRIL), and the Association pour l’Utilisation Pédagogique des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (AUPTIC).
Dr. Plews has over a decade of experience teaching in higher education in hospitality and education programs, as well as courses in educational technology. She is a graduate of the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University and worked in hotel sales and marketing and event planning before moving into teaching.
Dr. Laurie Poklop
Dr. Laurie Poklop
Senior Associate Director
Dr. Poklop’s doctoral research focused on the implementation and design of electronic portfolios, and this is another area in which she provides faculty development opportunities and consulting. She was a member of Cohort VI of the Inter/National Coalition for Research on Electronic Portfolios through which she completed a three-year study examining the effects of e-portfolios on the teaching of audience in first-year writing courses.
Dr. Poklop earned her Ed.D. from Northeastern University. She served as an instructional designer in Northeastern’s former Educational Technology Center for ten years and was a lecturer in the M.Ed. program in Instructional Design at UMass Boston for 15 years, teaching courses in instructional design, media-based training development, project management and research. She currently teaches for Northeastern’s Graduate School of Education. Prior to working in higher education, Dr. Poklop directed the consulting business of a technical training company.
Dr. Roben Torosyan
Dr. Roben Torosyan
Senior Associate Director
Dr. Torosyan’s (he/him/his) studies ranged from civil engineering and studio art to a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. His research focuses on critical thinking, consciousness development, and transformative facilitation, in publications including To Improve the Academy, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, and Learning Communities Journal and trade books including The Colbert Report and Philosophy.
With two decades of prior experience at Bridgewater State University, Fairfield University, The New School, and Pace University, he has helped dozens of colleagues generate peer-reviewed research submissions on disciplinary and transdisciplinary pedagogies. He has taught 29 courses, in philosophy, psychology, and education, 12 of them new curriculum designs. He has also given over 100 presentations, 50 of them invited, at institutions including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia and New York University. He is especially interested in integrating assessment with experiential learning, student-faculty partnership, and making the most of diversity, conflict and resistance.