Who We Are

Leadership

Yaacov Petscher, Associate Professor of Social Work at Florida State University, is the Director of the Quantitative Methodology and Innovative Division of FCRR. Dr. Petscher is an Associate Director at FCRR and is a Deputy Director of the National Center on Improving Literacy (NCIL), where he leads the Screening and Identification Strand. He is interested in the development and application of statistical models to data in order to understand why students differ in their reading skills, as well as creative disseminations of research through technology and alternative mediums.


Christopher Schatschneider, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, is an Associate Director of the Quantitative Methodology and Innovative Division of FCRR. Dr. Schatschneider is also an Associate Director of FCRR. Dr. Schatschneider has a strong interest in research design, measurement, and statistical methodology. He is interested in educational psychology, learning disabilities, quantitative methods and research design, and reading and language comprehension.


Richard Wagner, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, is an associate director of the Quantitative Methodology and Innovation Division of FCRR. Dr. Wagner is also an Associate Director of FCRR. Dr. Wagner’s research is focused on the normal acquisition of reading and dyslexia. His body of work has furthered the understanding of phonological processing in relation to learning to read and the development of reading disability. He is the principal investigator of the multidisciplinary Florida Learning Disabilities Research Center funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.


Researchers and Postdoc Scholars

Dr. Stanley is an Associate in Research at Florida State University, and has previously been full-time Psychology faculty at institutions in North Carolina and Florida. Throughout his career, he has been involved on a variety of collaborative research projects and applied activities related broadly to human performance, including factors and outcomes in athletic, health, psychosocial, and educational domains.


Sarah O’Dell, MSW

Associate in Research
850-644-3097

Sarah O’Dell is the Project Coordinator for the Reach Every Reader project, funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation. Sarah received an MSW in Clinical Social Work with an additional graduate certificate in Cultural Competency in Disaster Recover from Florida State University in 2007. She has since worked at the Florida Center for Reading Research in a variety of roles across projects, and most recently at the FSU College of Medicine, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine studying women’s mental health and child welfare.


Jamie Tock is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Quantitative Methodology and Innovation Division at FCRR. Dr. Tock’s graduate work was focused on the development and analysis of measures in education and their relation to improvements in grade performance. Currently, he is working on projects related to the understanding of the structure of morphological awareness and other reading constructs with the use of novel analytic techniques.


Callie Little is a Research Faculty I member in the Quantitative Methodology and Innovative Division of FCRR. Dr. Little's research involves understanding the development of reading, language and cognitive skills. Within this topic, her research focuses on two primary areas, (a) the individual differences in the development of and associations between cognitive and related behaviors, and (b) geocoding (mapping out what family and school neighborhoods are like) to examine how aspects of the environment might influence patterns of development. Her work involves the application of quantitative genetic analyses, meta-analytic methods, multilevel modeling, geo-coding, and developmental modeling of changes in skills over time.


Administrative Staff

Anna Grace Butler, M.S.W.

Assistant in Research
850-645-1927

Anna Grace Butler is the ReadNet Project Coordinator. She is also on the Project Management team for the Reach Every Reader Project. Anna Grace received her MSW in Clinical Social Work from Florida State University after obtaining her BA in Child Development and Family Studies from Berry College. Anna Grace joined the Florida Center for Reading Research in 2018 as Dr. Yaacov Petscher’s Executive Assistant. She has been on the Reach Every Reader Project since its first year in multiple capacities from Data Collector to Graduate Assistant before joining as faculty in 2023. Her primary interests include childhood trauma, mental health, and early learning assessment and intervention.


Graduate Students

Counseling Psychology and School Psychology Combined Ph.D. Program