• DEAN'S MESSAGE
• DEAN FOSTER
• ADMINISTRATION
• STUDENT SERVICES
• ASSOCIATE DEAN PARKER
• ASSOCIATE DEAN MCDONALD
• CONTACT DEAN MCDONALD

 

Associate Dean Janet McDonald

Janet McDonald serves as Interim Associate Dean and Director of  Interdisciplinary Programs. Her responsibilities include personnel matters, including promotion and tenure, third year reviews, faculty awards, and professorships. She works closely with Brenda Macon, Associate Director of Communication and Development, on the college magazine, Kaleidoscope, and with Lois Edmonds, in promoting and managing the college’s ten interdisciplinary programs: African and African American Studies, Chinese Culture and Commerce, Comparative Literature, Disaster Science and Management, Film and Media Arts, Jewish Studies, International Studies, Linguistics, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts. She also works with Dr. Nikki Clark, overseeing the college’s secondary education programs.

Dr. McDonald earned a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in German from Michigan State University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University.  Her area of specialization within the field of cognitive psychology is psycholinguistics.  She is interested in cognitive explanations for why learning a second language appears to be more difficult with increasing age of acquisition, as well as how working memory interacts with the comprehension of syntactic structures.  Her work has been published in such journals as the Journal of Memory and Language, Applied Psycholinguistics, and Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, as well as in the Annual Review of Psychology.

Dr. McDonald enjoys sharing her love of the empirical experiment with her students, and encouraging them in their research efforts.  To this end, she teaches an undergraduate course for psychology students interested in doing an honors thesis, and is the director of ASPIRE, the College of Arts & Sciences program to encourage and support undergraduate research.

Back