Our Team

  • Aubrie Swan Sein, PhD, EdM 

    • Executive Director of the Center for Education Research and Evaluation

    Dr. Aubrie Swan Sein is the Executive Director of the Center for Education Research and Evaluation (CERE). She has worked at CERE since 2009, and is an Associate Professor of Educational Assessment (in Dental Medicine and Pediatrics) at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC). Dr. Swan Sein leads the work of CERE to collaborate, consult, and advise in program development and evaluation, educational and evaluation research and scholarship, curriculum and instructional design, learner assessment and evaluation design, educator development, and counseling about long-term learning and studying strategies. Her scholarly interests are in how assessment systems can be structured to promote student long-term learning, and how best to support students to develop high-quality learning and studying strategies.  She is a member of the Apgar Academy of Medical Educators, a past Northeast Group on Education Affairs (NEGEA) Medical Education Scholarship, Research, and Evaluation (MESRE) chair, and a graduate of the AAMC Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) Program. She has a PhD in Educational Psychology and an EdM in Education Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and a BA in Psychology from Binghamton University.

  • Florante (Jun) Garcia

    • Director, Data & Analytics

    Florante (Jun) Garcia is Director, Data & Analytics at Columbia University Medical Center's Center for Education Research and Evaluation. In this capacity, he is responsible for programming and managing several databases combining data from many different sources for the purposes of curriculum evaluation, continuous quality improvement, accreditation maintenance, student advising, education research, and other CERE data reporting initiatives.  

    Prior to joining Columbia, he served as a Data Manager at the New York State Department of Health’s Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology. In this role, Jun managed and supported several research project databases for data abstraction, processing, and reporting in the Congenital Malformations Registry, with primary responsibilities supporting the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Surveillance Project in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control. Jun received his BS in Biological Sciences from the State University of New York at Albany.

  • Henry Park, PhD

    • Director, Data & Analytics

    Dr. Henry Park is Director, Data & Analytics at Columbia University Medical Center's Center for Education Research and Evaluation. In this capacity,  he supports program evaluation, curriculum development, accreditation issues, faculty and resident development, and educational scholarship initiatives at the medical school and affiliate hospital, New York Presbyterian and The College of Dental Medicine.  Dr. Park also provides statistical support for the Virginia Apgar Society, supporting faculty scholarship and development, and serving on their grant committee. Day-to-Day activities include evaluating learner performance, data analysis, evaluating program effectiveness, continuous quality improvement, and consultation.  He is also an Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University Medical Center, providing consultation to residents and faculty on research design and analysis. 

    Prior to joining Columbia, he served as a Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in Education at the Graduate Center CUNY. His direct service experience includes managing and reviewing grant applications, database management, statistical analysis, and reporting, as well as program design and evaluation in a higher education environment. Dr. Park has a PhD in Developmental Psychology and an MPhil in Psychology from The Graduate Center-CUNY, and a BA in Psychology from Auburn University. 

  • Shubha Dathatri, PhD, EdM 

    • Senior Director, Medical Education & Learning

    Dr. Shubha Dathatri has been serving as Senior Director, Medical Education & Learning with CERE at the Columbia University Medical Center since 2024.  Her experience in medical education began in surgical education specifically as she had been serving, prior to joining CERE, as a surgical educator within departments of surgery at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine and the Baylor College of Medicine.  In Dr. Dathatri’s current role, her efforts across both undergraduate and graduate medical education platforms are focused on providing clinical educators with effective tools to teach, to evaluate learner performance, and to reflect on the efficacy of their own educational practices.  Through an exploration of pedagogical practices in medical education, her work involves developing and refining evaluation and assessment instruments, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, and writing analytic case reports assessing the impact, effectiveness, and sustainability of the programs and interventions under consideration.  She is dedicated to using educational and social science research tools to improve instructional, evaluation, and assessment systems and to enhance learning outcomes in medical education.   

    Dr. Dathatri earned a PhD  in Educational Psychology from the Stanford University School of Education, an EdM in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, an MA in Comparative and International Education from Teachers College Columbia University, and a BS in Social Psychology from Cornell University.

  • Todd A. Bates, PhD, MSEd, MA

    • Senior Director, Medical Education & Learning

    Dr. Todd A. Bates is Senior Director, Medical Education & Learning at CERE and Assistant Clinical Professor of Education Assessment (in Medicine). His goal is to help empower the medical educators and learners at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Columbia University Irving Medical Center to incorporate innovative pedagogies from the field of teacher education into their work at Columbia and beyond. Prior to joining CERE, he worked in teacher education at Montclair State University, performance assessment at ETS, and was a school district administrator outside of Philadelphia. He also served as the inaugural doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weingarten Center, and as a school teacher in the United States and abroad. Todd completed his BA at Juniata College, MA at The Ohio State University, MSEd and initial doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and PhD at Montclair State University. 

  • Anabelle Andon, PhD, MA

    • Director, Medical Education & Learning

    Dr. Anabelle Andon is Director, Medical Education & Learning at CERE and the International Editor of the journal Teaching and Learning in Medicine. Her main role at CERE is to advance and facilitate educational programs, counseling services, and learning resources that promote academic success; to provide consulting services for students with specific emphasis on learning, study, and test-taking strategies; and to support educator development coaching including: assisting instructors in curriculum development, writing effective learning objectives, developing and utilizing useful, reliable and valid teaching and assessment tools, and analyzing and reporting results that provide evidence of learning.

    Previously, she worked as Clinical Faculty and the Director of the Learning Resource Center at the City University of New York School of Medicine and as a Learning Scientist at the Florida International university College of Medicine. In both roles, she developed empirically supported programs to support the academic success of medical students and participated in early identification of students with academic difficulty, evaluated their academic progress, and developed strategies for improvement appropriate to their learning needs.

    Internationally, Dr. Andon has also worked on several projects which have focused on the decolonization of medical education and publishing, and the provision of a quality education to disadvantaged populations such as immigrants, migrants, and indigenous students both in the United States as well as in Latin American countries. As a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellow (FLAS) in 2009, she traveled to the Ecuadorian Amazon where she conducted qualitative research on the education provided to indigenous children.

    She holds a certificate in measurement and statistics, a certificate in project management, and certificates from the National Center for Education Statistics on conducting research utilizing large scale assessments. A native of Mexico, Anabelle is bilingual in English and Spanish and has studied Italian and Kichwa.

  • Zixun Hao, MS

    • Assistant Director, Data & Analytics

    Zixun Hao serves as Assistant Director, Data & Analytics at CERE. She provides support for database management, data analytics and visualization, data science projects, continuous quality improvement, and other CERE data reporting initiatives. Prior to joining Columbia, she was a Program Assistant for the M.S. in Business Analytics program at Georgetown University. Zixun completed her MS in Data Science for Public Policy at Georgetown University.