UCLA Ed&IS Welcomes Six New Faculty Members

Lori Patton Davis, brings a wealth of experience to the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies as a professor of education and the new Heyman Endowed Chair and faculty director of the UCLA Educational Leadership Program. She is best known for research on the effects of race and racism in higher education, the experiences of Black girls and women in educational and social contexts, college student development, and the impact of campus diversity initiatives on student success. Prior to joining UCLA, she was a professor and department chair at The Ohio State University.

A leader in education, Professor Patton Davis is a former president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. She is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), where she currently serves as chair for the committee on Scholars and Advocates for Gender Equity. Patton Davis is also a member of the National Academy of Education and a frequently sought expert on various education topics, and has also advised university presidents and other senior administrators, philanthropic foundation executives, culture center directors, and educators in urban K-12 schools.

Professor Davis achieved her Ph.D. in higher education at Indiana University; her M.A. in college student personnel at Bowling Green State University; and her bachelor’s degree in speech communication at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Julissa Muñiz joins the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies as an assistant professor of education. Her research explores race and racism, power and privilege, racial and ethnic identity development, organizational logics, and abolition at the intersections of the education, criminal and juvenile legal systems. Muñiz’s work is focused on teaching, learning, and identity development in juvenile court schools, with an interest in how incarcerated students live and learn while confined, drawing on theories and concepts from various fields including education, human development, psychology, and critical carceral studies. Most recently, Muñiz was an assistant professor of psychology and of education at UC Santa Cruz. 

Professor Muñiz is a first-generation borderlands scholar from San Ysidro, California. In 2021, she founded the San Ysidro Rising Scholar Award, a scholarship and mentorship program that supports first-generation college students who graduated from her alma mater, San Ysidro High School. Before entering graduate school, Muñiz was a middle school academic counselor for TRIO Talent Search in Oakland, California, and a GED co-instructor for the Adult Peer Education Project at San Quentin State Prison. 

Cinthya Salazar joins the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies as an assistant professor of education. Her research focuses on the mechanisms used by undocumented students to access, persist, and succeed in higher education, and seeks to generate localized retention theories and student success models which can potentially reduce minoritized students’ college attrition. 

Professor Salazar’s research and pedagogy are informed by her experiences as a higher education administrator, working for more than eight years as a student affairs professional, primarily in student retention and success programs. Her other research interests include undocumented students with and without DACA; minoritized students’ success in higher education; college access and retention; and participatory action research. Most recently, Salazar has been an assistant professor in the Educational Administration and Human Resource Development department at Texas A&M University since 2020.

Jordan Rickles, who joins UCLA School of Education and Information Studies as an assistant professor of education, has more than 15 years of experience designing and conducting experimental and quasi-experimental research studies on policies, programs, and strategies for improving student learning opportunities and performance. He specializes in research design and quantitative methodology, with a particular interest in investigating variation in effects and practices across schools. Rickles’s education research and evaluation experience includes work within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA. Most recently, he was a principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), where he led multiple federally-funded studies. Rickles’s recent research projects include a study of an online credit recovery program in Los Angeles high schools and a national evaluation of a middle school supplemental math program. In 2015, he was awarded an IES Statistical Research Methodology in Education Early Career Grant to study the implications of student attrition for study designs. 

A double Bruin, Rickles earned his Ph.D. in education from the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, with a concentration in Social Research Methodology, and his master of public policy degree from the UCLA School of Public Affairs (now the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs). Rickles was also an IES pre-doctoral fellow in the UCLA Advanced Quantitative Methodology program. He achieved his bachelor of science degree from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Jin Wang joins the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies as an assistant professor of education. Her research employs a combination of behavioral assessments and neuroimaging techniques, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, to examine differences in the development of the linguistic brain and its influence on academic achievement, in particular, the development of language comprehension during early childhood. Her research seeks to construct a neurocognitive model that interprets the underlying mechanisms of language development during the first ten years of life and its relationship to reading and math skills. 

Most recently, Professor Wang was a post-doctoral scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She earned her Ph.D. in psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. She has done novel work examining the specialization of different linguistic processes in the brain and the longitudinal relation of language processing to reading acquisition, and expanded her areas of expertise into math skills during her post-doctoral training. Professor Wang was honored by the Society for Neurobiology of Language for her dissertation, which investigated how the neural basis of one linguistic skill (i.e, phonological awareness) is longitudinally associated with word reading achievement.

Melissa Villa-Nicholas joins the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies as an assistant professor of information studies. Her work focuses on the information and technology histories and practices of Latinxs, immigrant information rights, and critical approaches to information science. Most recently, Villa-Nicholas was an associate professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Rhode Island. 

Professor Villa-Nicholas’s first book, “Latinas on the Line: Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications” (Rutgers Press), received an honorable mention from the Labor Tech Network book award for 2022. Her second book, “Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants,” was released in July 2023 by UC Press and received the 2023 Book Award for the McGannon Center from Fordham University.