Susan Bush-Mecenas, Jill Locke, Nicole Mirra, and Mike Hoa Nguyen will share scholarship and expertise.
This fall, the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies welcomes four new faculty members. Jill Locke, PhD; Nicole Mirra, PhD; and Mike Hoa Nguyen PhD, join the Department of Education, effective as of July 1. Susan Bush-Mecenas, PhD, will assume her role as an assistant professor of evaluation in education, effective March 1, 2026. Locke, Mirra, and Nguyen are UCLA alumni.
“I am delighted to welcome four outstanding new colleagues to the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies,” says Wasserman Dean Christina Christie. “Professors Nicole Mirra, Mike Hoa Nguyen, and Jill Locke, each proud UCLA alumni, join us alongside Susan Bush-Mecenas, bringing exceptional expertise, creativity, and dedication to scholarship and practice in education. Their presence strengthens our community and deepens our capacity to prepare the next generation of leaders, educators, and researchers. We are thrilled to have them in our ranks!”
Locke joins the UCLA Education faculty as an associate professor-in-residence of education. With her expertise in implementation science, human-centered design, and collaboration with publicly funded school systems, Professor Locke’s research focuses on the presentation of social functioning for autistic youth in inclusive school settings; and an understanding of successful implementation and sustainment of evidence-based practices (EBPs) for autistic youth in public school settings.
Most recently, Locke’s research has focused on the identification and examination of malleable individual and organizational characteristics that increase teachers’ and paraeducators’ use of EBPs to include and retain autistic children in general education settings, and developing and testing implementation strategies to support EBP use in the public K-12 system. Professor Locke’s experiences have highlighted the importance of collaborating with public schools and the reality of working within the constraints of publicly funded systems, the school calendar year, and school personnel.
A triple Bruin, Locke graduated with her BA cum laude in psychology; her MA in education, and her PhD in education at UCLA. She also was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
Professor Locke held a variety of positions at UCLA while a student and graduate student, including those of graduate student research associate at the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and an intern for the UCLA Early Childhood Partial Hospitalization Program. She also has served as co-director of the School Mental Health Assessment, Research, and Training (SMART) Center at the University of Washington. Prior to returning to UCLA, Locke was an associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington.
Mirra joins UCLA Ed&IS as an associate professor of education and faculty director of the Teacher Education Program (TEP). Her research utilizes participatory design methods in classroom, community, and digital spaces to collaboratively create learning environments with teachers and youth that disrupt structures of social injustice and creatively compose liberatory futures.
Professor Mirra’s scholarship is animated by critical sociocultural theories of democracy, literacy, race, and pedagogy, centering the counter-stories of marginalized communities to support teachers in fostering empathetic, ethical, and vulnerable dialogue and action across lines of ideological and demographic difference.
A former classroom teacher of English language arts and debate in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, Mirra partners with educators and youth in formal and informal learning settings to create educational interventions that confront inequities within current social arrangements and imagine new civic possibilities into existence. Her praxis innovates content methods pedagogy and field work in teacher education via the action principle that every teacher is a civics teacher that can support the creation of a more equitable society.
Among Professor Mirra’s accolades is the 2020 Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research, given by the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age for her book, “Educating for Empathy: Literacy Engagement and Civic Learning,” published by Teachers College Press. Her work has appeared in Review of Research in Education, Journal of Literacy Research, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Urban Education, and more. Mirra is also the lead co-author of the books “Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students,” published by Routledge, and “Civics for the World to Come: Committing to Democracy in Every Classroom,” published by Norton.
Mirra has been honored with the Arthur Applebee Award for Excellence in Research on Literacy from the Literacy Research Association (2021); the David H. Russell Research Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English from the National Council of Teachers of English (2019); the Early Career Scholar Award, Grassroots Community & Youth Organizing Special Interest Group, from the American Educational Research Association (AERA, 2019); and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018-2019).
A UCLA alumna (’12, PhD, Urban Schooling), Professor Mirra attained her M.Ed. in education policy and management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; her MST in English education at Pace University; and her BA in English at New York University. Prior to returning to UCLA as a faculty member, effective July 1, she was an associate professor of urban teacher education at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education.
Nguyen joins the Ed&IS faculty as an associate professor of education. The UCLA alumnus is a scholar of higher education policy, examining the benefits and consequences of racialized public policy instruments in expanding and/or constraining educational systems, with a specific focus on how these dynamics shape access, learning, opportunity, and success within and beyond schools for students of color.
Nguyen serves as principal investigator of The Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI) Data Project, a research and resource initiative aims to advance a greater understanding of MSIs and their unique contributions to postsecondary education. An extension of this work explores Asian American & Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) and their role in building capacity to serve Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander students, staff, faculty, and administrators.
Nguyen has extensive experience in federal government, having served as a senior staff member in the United States Congress. During the Biden-Harris Administration, he was appointed to the first-ever Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions Federal Advisory Council at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Nguyen was also appointed by the Governor of Colorado to the History, Culture, Social Contributions, and Civil Government in Education Commission.
Professor Nguyen currently serves on the board of directors for Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education (APAHE) and Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) and provides research consulting for education and civil rights organizations.
Before returning to UCLA, Nguyen served as an assistant professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
Professor Nguyen received his PhD in education with a graduate concentration/certificate in Asian American studies and MA in education at UCLA; and his BA in American studies with a minor in Asian American studies at UC Berkeley. He is the proud son of Vietnamese American refugees.
Bush-Mecenas will join the Ed&IS faculty as an assistant professor of evaluation in education, effective March 1, 2026. Her research examines the implementation of education policies and programs within organizational systems. Through large-scale qualitative and mixed-methods evaluation studies, she explores topics such as evaluation methods and continuous improvement, capacity and capacity building in state and local educational agencies, and the alignment, sustainability, and scaling of instructional reform.
Professor Bush-Mecenas currently serves as a policy researcher at RAND, faculty member at the RAND School of Policy, and senior research fellow and adjunct faculty at Claremont Graduate University.
At present, she manages a portfolio of large-scale evaluation studies, serving as co-PI on: the Networks for School Improvement Summative Evaluation, funded by the Gates Foundation; the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) High-Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development Network Evaluation, and the State Implementation Fund Evaluation, both funded by the Walton Family Foundation; and an evaluation of a kindergarten numeracy curriculum through a federal Education and Innovation Research grant, among others.
Recent publications include: “‘The business of teaching and learning’: Institutionalizing equity in educational organizations through continuous improvement” for the American Educational Research Journal, which received the AERA Districts in Research and Reform SIG 2025 Best Paper Award; and “Research, Interrupted: Addressing Practical and Methodological Considerations under Turbulent Conditions,” for Educational Policy Analysis Archives. Her work has been featured as a methodological exemplar in Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña’s (2020) Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook, 4th Edition.
Professor Bush-Mecenas completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. She earned her PhD in urban education policy at USC; her MA in policy, organization and leadership studies at Stanford; and her BM in music education at USC. Professor Bush-Mecenas began her career as a K-12 teacher in public schools.