Dean's Bio

Gale M. Morrison, Ph.D. is Dean of the Graduate Division at UCSB and a Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Counseling/Clinical/School Psychology. She was Acting Dean of the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UCSB for a year and a half between 2005 and 2006. She has also contributed to UCSB in numerous other ways over the years, including as chair of the UCSB Academic Senate Graduate Council, and member of the UC Academic Senate Coordinating Committee on Graduate Affairs.

In her role with the Graduate Division, she served on the UC Systemwide Student Health Committee in 2006. She is currently the Chair of the UC Systemwide NSF AGEP (Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate) Steering Committee. This past year she chaired a committee of faculty and senior administrators to coordinate our campus response to the National Research Council for its assessment of graduate doctoral programs.

Dr. Morrison received her Ph.D. in Special Education from the University of California, Riverside. When not serving in administration, she participates in a NASP-approved school psychology credential program and trains doctoral students in an APA-approved Counseling/Clinical/School Psychology program. She recently completed a research project funded by the U. S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (field-initiated research award). This research examined the risk and resilience patterns for upper elementary students with and without disabilities who were experiencing discipline problems at school. The project facilitated the documentation of the schooling trajectories of students as they transition to middle or junior high schools; during the tenure of the project, many of these students experienced involuntary transfers to alternative settings for their behavior (the beginning of being "pushed out" of school). Dr. Morrison has published work on resiliency with special needs children, as well as work on school safety and violence. She is one of the few research professionals in the nation that is publishing information about suspension/expulsion disciplinary processes as they affect special education students.

Dr. Morrison also has had extensive evaluation experience with projects that use the risk and resilience framework as a basis for programming (after-school programs and teen pregnancy prevention). These projects have been funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the California Department of Education. Dr. Morrison is affiliated with the UCSB Center for School-Based Youth Development. This Center was founded in order to facilitate research and development in the area of school engagement, recognizing that this concept applies to all students (those with learning and behavior challenges as well as others).