As a professor, I had three general areas of responsibility: Teaching, Research, and Service

Teaching:  I taught 4 to 5 courses per term, including Introductory Psychology, Human Growth and Development, Critical Thinking and Writing in Psychology, Research Methods II (Applications), Positive Psychology, and Psychology of Religion.  We had a small department, so by necessity I was more of a generalist in my teaching, and I loved that.  

Research: My personal research projects addressed children's knowledge about emotion and religion or positive thinking. I also (with my colleague Dr. Kristin Lagattuta) developed a measure of optimism, called the Future Expectations Task,  for children under the age of 8. It is now on Open Science Framework for anyone who studies children and needs a measure of optimism.  In addition to my own research I supervised student research projects, both in independent studies and in my Research Methods course, where students conduct a series studies from beginning to end, including data collection and analysis, and presenting the results in an APA formatted paper.  

Service: As a faculty member I participated in shared governance in the forms of committee work and my work within our chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Locally to my department I advised and mentor students, coordinated the schedule of courses, developed curriculum proposals, conducted assessment, and advised on curricular matters related to my areas of expertise.  I served on numerous departmental, division, and university-wide committees and chaired several of them, including Faculty Affairs, the University's Academic Integrity Board, and several search committees.   For many years I also served as the chair of the psychology department and as the Director of the School of Social Sciences and Education. 

In September 2026 I completed the Co-Active ACC Certification package, which included 71 hours of coach training and 3 months of coach supervision.   I earned the Co-Active Practitioner Certification (CAP) as part of this process, and completed the ACC certification in October 2026 (100 hours of coaching and a written exam) to earn the designation of Associate Certified Coach (ACC). 

For my dissertation I looked at the development of children’s knowledge that thinking positive thoughts would lead to better emotions than thinking negative ones.  It turns out that they do understand this from a very early age (kindergarten), as they accurately predicted that people would feel better when thinking on the bright side in positive, negative, and ambiguous scenarios. They were reasonable about it, too, and didn’t predict that a person would feel good when reframing a negative event, just a little better than if they thought negatively.

I also wanted to see how how individual differences in optimism might affect this understanding, but at the time there were no measures of optimism for children younger than age 8, so I set out to develop one.  The result of that effort is now available on Open Science Framework for anyone who studies children and needs a measure of optimism.  

For my OCHJS dissertation (equivalent of a US masters thesis) I researched the practice of solar worship in ancient Israelite popular religion.  Of course, the central religion forbade any worship of a deity besides YHWH, but as with many things that were prohibited by the priests and prophets, there is evidence both within the biblical text and the archeological record that something more interesting was happening on the ground.  (On a very basic level, you wouldn't have prohibitions against things that people weren't doing.)

I was honored by the Award for "Best Dissertation" in my cohort for this research.