About
Faculty Liaisons
JAY SOKOLOVSKY, PH.D.
College of Arts and Sciences
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Dr. Sokolovsky is a cultural anthropologist with specialties in urban anthropology, the anthropology of aging, rural development in Mexico, and video documentation. His book, “The Cultural Context of Old Age” (1997) won the Kalish award in innovative publications. This past summer Dr. Sokolovsky was awarded a Senior Investigator Grant ($6496) from USF St. Petersburg for “Globalization and the Transformation of An Indigenous Region in Mexico,” a study on how globalization is affecting youth and the elderly in a Mexican village. This will allow him to regionally expand his work surrounding the central Mexican Municipio of Texcoco. During his upcoming research trip to Mexico this May/June he will be presenting a talk on this research at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and presenting and discussing his new ethnographic video “Urban Garden: Fighting for Life and Beauty” at the Colegio de Postgraduados Desarrollo Rural in Montecillos.
Jay is continuing his ethnographic video work on ethnic identity of immigrants to Tampa Bay with a focus on Thai Americans and their connection to Buddhist Temples in the area. He is working on this project with undergraduate student Mike Meyers who is a dual major in Mass Communications and Anthropology. He has previously completed videos on West African and Italians in St. Petersburg.
VAROL KAYHAN, PH.D.
Kate Tiedemann School of Business and Finance
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Dr. Varol Kayhan is an associate professor of information systems at the Kate Tiedemann School of Business and Finance. His research interests include information privacy, confirmation bias on the Web, and predictive algorithms. Dr. Kayhan is teaching database, predictive analytics, and business intelligence courses in both graduate and undergraduate programs. He is also supervising students to conduct data analyses for companies in the Tampa Bay area. Dr. Kayhan holds PhD and MS degrees from the University of South Florida.
CHARLES VANOVER, PH.D.
College of Education
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Dr. Vanover graduated with a BA from the University of Chicago, and worked as a teacher and a teacher-librarian for eight years in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) before receiving a fellowship to study educational administration and policy at the University of Michigan. At CPS, he was elected to his high school’s local school council, and the professional problems committee. Dr. Vanover helped in finding Helping Hands small school and served on the leadership committee of Chicago Librarians United for Education.
At the University of Michigan, he worked as a Graduate Research Assistant on the Study of Instructional Improvement under the direction of his advisor, Brian Rowan. Dr. Vanover was then selected to work on the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s (CPRE) longitudinal evaluation of the federally funded National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality. He served for five years as lead qualitative analyst. The completed five year evaluation report was turned into the U. S. Department of Education in the spring of 2011.
Here at USF St. Petersburg, Dr. Vanover is the head of the evaluation committee for the Sunbay Digital Mathematics Project and recently presented two papers discussing implementation, first at the 32nd annual Penn Ethnography Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, and then at the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning at the University of Hong Kong. He presented my dissertation work to Division C at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AREA) and serve as a reviewer for AERA’s sections on school improvement and teacher quality.
Dr. Vanover works as program faculty for the USF St. Petersburg Department of School Leadership and teaches ‘Foundations of Curriculum’ and ‘Program Evaluation’ among other courses. He was elected head of the College Council for the School of Education in the spring of 2011. He also serve as a representative to the university’s research council and was elected to the Pinellas County Public Schools, ESE Advisory Committee.