School of Education Leadership Transition

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that Julie Washington, Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Diversity and Professor of Education, has been appointed Interim Dean of the School of Education, effective April 3, 2025.

A member of the UC Irvine faculty since 2021, Professor Washington previously served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Georgia State University and Professor and Chair of the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Wisconsin. She previously held appointments on the research faculty at the University of Michigan and was a Professor at Wayne State University.

Professor Washington's research is focused on the intersection of literacy, language variation, and poverty. In particular, her work focuses on understanding the role of cultural dialect in assessment, identification of reading disabilities in school-aged African American children, and on disentangling the relationship between language production and comprehension on development of reading and early language skills for African American children growing up in poverty. She is a speech-language pathologist and directs the Language Variation and Academic Success lab at UC Irvine. She also directs the Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Professor Washington is a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and currently serves as editor-in-chief of the language section of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Please join me in thanking Professor Washington for taking on this important leadership role.

Sincerely,

Hal Stern
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor
Distinguished Professor, Department of Statistics