Christina “Tina” Christie, currently interim dean of the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies, will be the new Wasserman Dean of the school, effective April 1.

Christie, a professor of education, has served as interim dean of the school since July 2020. Previously, she was chair of the department of education and head of the department’s social research methodology division. Before her appointment at UCLA in 2010, she served for nine years on the faculty at Claremont Graduate University.

“It is an extraordinary honor for me to serve as the next dean of Ed&IS, the school that has given so much to me. The Ed&IS faculty, students and staff and our UCLA and community partners are the most outstanding scholars and practitioners of education and information studies in the world today, working at the most extraordinary public university in the world,” Christie said.

“I am humbled by the opportunity to serve a school that takes up scholarship on education and information that is at once rigorous and meticulous. It is work that is driven by an ethic of responsibility for the furtherance of human good, an ethic that eminently befits a public university entrusted with advancing social good,” she added.

A scholar of program and policy evaluation, Christie focuses her research on understanding evaluation as a method for facilitating social change. She has served as a lead investigator on more than 30 grants and contracts totaling approximately $33 million to study education, child maltreatment and health behavior programs. She is the former director of the University of California Educational Evaluation Center, which had sites at seven UC campuses, and serves as co-investigator on the National Institutes of Health Diversity Program Consortium’s Coordination and Evaluation Center.

Currently an advisory board member for the Latina Researchers Network, she has served on the board of directors of the American Evaluation Association and as an advisory board member for the Annie E. Casey Foundation Leaders in Equitable Evaluation and Diversity Program and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation New Connections Program.

“Chancellor Block and I are grateful for Tina’s distinguished service as interim dean during the past eight months,” said Emily Carter, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, in a message to campus. “Both in this role and as department chair, Tina has proven to be a strong leader and an effective administrator, and we are confident that the school will reach new heights with her at the helm.”

Christie has been the recipient of the American Educational Research Association’s 2018 Research on Evaluation Special Interest Group Distinguished Scholar Award and the American Evaluation Association’s 2019 Research on Evaluation Distinguished Scholar Award. Her efforts to build a strong department community earned her the UCLA Staff Assembly’s 2018 Faculty/Staff Partnership Award.

Christie earned her doctorate from UCLA; her master of arts and master of education from Teachers College, Columbia University; and her bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York.