Melvin Hall

Melvin Hall, Ph.D., is Professor of Educational Psychology at Northern Arizona University. He completed his B.S., and Ph.D., degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in Social Psychology and Educational Psychology respectively; and M.S. in Counseling at Northern Illinois University.

During a forty plus-year professional career in higher education, Dr. Hall has served in four successive appointments, as an academic dean, comprised of positions at Florida Atlantic University, University of California-Irvine, University of Maryland at College Park, and Northern Arizona University (NAU). At NAU, Dr. Hall was Dean of the College of Education and additionally the principal investigator on two five-year US Office of Education GEAR UP grants, providing dropout prevention programs and services to thousands of middle and high school students throughout Arizona.

Returning to full-time faculty life in 2002, Dr. Hall has melded teaching and scholarship in Educational Psychology with responsibility as co-principal investigator on five-years of National Science Foundation support for the Relevance of Culture in Evaluation Institute. As an external reviewer, Dr. Hall has served on numerous panels and Committee of Visitors for the National Science Foundation EHR Directorate. Additional work at NSF included being part of an invited expert panel on the future of evaluation methodology in STEM programs. In 2015, he accepted a one-year appointment as an “intermittent expert” at NSF, and in that capacity served as a program officer for the ADVANCE and HBCU UP Programs.

In 2013, Dr. Hall began a three-year term as an elected member of the American Evaluation Association Board of Directors. In addition, he continues to serve as a member of the Inclusive Excellence Commission of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and the External Advisory Committee for the Collaborative for the Advancement of STEM Leadership (CASL). He is currently also involved in moderating and producing three national events in the series: AEA Dialogue on Race and Class in America. He is also an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment at the University of Illinois, Urbana.