2026 Spring April 20, 2026
Improving lives through science: Interim Dean Frank Symons on the future of CEHD
Photo above: Interim Dean Symons with Michael Rodriguez grilling at a Department of Educational Psychology event. Photo by Sarah Jergenson.
CEHD interim dean shares his thoughts and goals
Frank Symons is the new interim dean at CEHD. He began serving in this position on January 1, when Michael C. Rodriguez became chancellor at the University of Minnesota Morris. Rodriguez will stay in this role until 2028 and then return to CEHD as dean. Symons, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, has been at CEHD since 2000. He was most recently the senior associate dean of research and policy. We sat down to talk with him about his views and the goals he has for his new role.
Frank Symons and Department of Curriculum and Instruction Professor Mark Vagle help Jana Lo Bello Miller ERICA with her PhD hood at commencement. Photo by Erica Loeks.
You hail from the Great White North. How did you make your way to Minnesota and CEHD?
By snowmobile (laughs). I’m a Canadian and the first half of my life in higher ed was as a student at the University of Manitoba in experimental psychology, and then I did my master’s in Alberta in educational psychology and special education. The PhD took me to the states at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education. My PhD is in education and human development. I finished at Vanderbilt and did an additional year as a postdoc. I made my way to UNC Chapel Hill for three years as a research scientist at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. After seeing an ultrasound of what became my firstborn—my son—I thought I maybe should be looking into a regular academy job. A senior colleague let me know there was an opening, a position posted at Minnesota. I interviewed and they offered me the position. I’ve been here ever since. That’s 26 years ago.
Your graduate degrees are in educational psychology and education and human development. What drives your interest in these fields?
Both professional and personal. I’ve worked as a direct care staff; I’ve worked in the special ed areas—in Manitoba it was called instructional assistant—very directly with individuals, both children and into adulthood, with significant intellectual and developmental disabilities. My goal was to continue working directly in that field in community-based settings. Somewhere along the way, during my master’s, I got bit by the research bug and started asking questions about why people did certain things, and my focus has been very much as a scientist on the problem of self-injury in those with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This is both thinking about assessment and treatment, but also the more basic science about its development in the first place. That began a set of questions about pain. Why would someone self-injure? Doesn’t it hurt? And there are a bunch of questions in there when people have support needs related to language and communication where the spoken word is not necessarily an asset. Many of the ways we approach pain are language-based and it’s created a program of work about trying to understand ways to validly and reliably assess pain and pain signals in individuals with communication limitations or support needs. The support needs and issues around pain and health outcomes and self-injury are my primary focus areas. This is what drives me.
Prior to being named interim dean, you served as the senior associate dean for research and policy. During your time in this role, what have been some of CEHD’s most noteworthy research achievements? Have there been any that in your mind were underreported and deserve greater recognition?
In my time as ADR, different groups have been involved in very high-impact research as it relates to early childhood literacy. There’s been significant accomplishments there. There are significant accomplishments in early childhood development in both brain and behavior and creating that translational pipeline for what we characterize as the first 1,000 days. And if the brain is not on a trajectory of what we might characterize as well-defined, neurotypical development, we have a lot of high-impact work in that space that covers research discovery, practice improvements, and policy engagement. We’ve had remarkable accomplishments in children’s mental health. There’s been a lot of impactful work in relation to adopting a personalized medical framework into children’s mental health and service delivery. And with autism, there are research, practice, and policy experts in this college that are continuously coming together in different ways to drive discovery and drive impact. That’s a big, broad tent, but we have exceptionally talented people as investigators, whether they’re tenure track faculty, contract faculty, or research professionals that have made remarkable contributions in those areas. I’ll also give a shout out to the methodologists of the college. For those of us like me, I don’t get anywhere without methodology, and the college has an abundance of methodologists that make discipline-specific contributions in their own right as well as help the rest of us drive the pursuit of what we’re asking questions about or hypothesizing forward.
What are some of CEHD’s as-of-yet untapped research areas where you expect major growth in the years ahead?
If the simple shorthand is AI—it really isn’t just whatever AI means right now because it moves rapidly—we have a remarkable breadth and depth across a number of academic and research units. We have folks that know large language models. We have folks that know the computational side. We have folks that spend time on the ethics side. So, when I look at the conversation we can have right now that we weren’t able to have five years ago with regard to research and practice and policy issues in AI in K12 education and beyond, we’re well-positioned. We’re already very active, but we’re well-positioned to be a champion and leader both in the University and the state, and I would say nationally as well. This is going to be a vector for growth for us. And we continue to strengthen by positioning ourselves as a partner and a colleague with other groups across campus, notably the other side of Washington Avenue in pediatrics and other academic health departments in the med school. There is no end of opportunity there for us to make a difference. I would also mention our telehealth lab within the Institute on Community Integration that also serves as a core hub within the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain. That has quickly become a core research facility-like property being used and leveraged by multiple groups to advance our ability to reach families using telehealth and making ZIP codes irrelevant.
Research “road trip” for Rett syndrome. Frank Symons and research team on the road in greater Chicago for an annual Rett syndrome research conference using the U's mobile research truck. Photo courtesy of Frank Symons.
As you serve as interim dean, what are your goals for the time you have? Where would you like CEHD to be when your term ends?
My goal is to see that there’s a strategic roadmap that is CEHD-specific and reflects our values and is aligned with our mission and aligned with the University’s strategic roadmap. That will let us move forward for the next five to 10 years as our anchor point. I get asked about my vision—my vision right now is to have this roadmap that reflects who we are and where we want to go. It will serve us well as we look to the future where we know there’s a new capital campaign coming and the way the funding landscape has changed very rapidly—and not for the better—in the past 12 months. We need to be very strategic in how we think about that and how to continue to be competitive for sponsor projects or external sales that are ultimately about furthering our mission, furthering our reach, and furthering our impact. There are a lot of headwinds there and the roadmap process is about getting ourselves better positioned to know and be aware of who’s doing what in this college. It will elevate our ability to have conversations that may lead to cooperation if not full-on collaboration and being partner ready. With such a shift and change in funding landscapes, we need to be better informed of who we are, what we value, what our mission is, and how we’re going to work together.
What challenges do you anticipate for CEHD? What strengths will the college tap into to address these challenges?
Our challenges are not in one sense unique around the University, but the convergence of such uncertainty at the federal level and state budget uncertainty are adding up in terms of these headwinds that we just need to be very clear about what we’re trying to accomplish and the timelines and resources we have to do that. Our strength is in our diversity; our strength is in our stories. We have fantastic students, undergraduate and graduate, and our faculty and staff. The more I’m settling into this role, the humbling elements of it don’t stop in terms of how deeply committed people are to CEHD in terms of its value structure and its mission. We need to lean into that to sharpen our vision and have our stories read, because these headwinds are non-trivial related to budgetary pressures and a scope reduction process underway University-wide—literally meaning cutting our operating budget by 7 percent. We’re partway through it—it’s not complete. The challenging part is everything we do is important. We’re already a very lean college, and yet the expectation is of the scope reduction. So, the approach has to reflect what we value, our core mission with regard to the state’s needs in teacher education, special ed teacher education, children’s mental health, and child welfare. We’re an engine of that. That’s the strength we need to draw on that makes a difference in the value-added proposition for our state, for our education K12 leaders, for our human service leaders, and the way the state looks at us. They’re aware, but I think we could do a better job of sharpening our vision and mission statement there as it relates to making sure people understand that we’re here to help and we help through science. And our students. That’s what we live and breathe. We just need to keep pushing forward with the challenge of scope reduction and forcing us to align and be more focused in key areas of what we do.
These are unprecedented times for higher education, particularly in the research space. What are your thoughts about this current atmosphere and what gives you hope?
I kind of alluded to that in part of some of my prior comments that we’re in a time where there’s uncertainty around sources of federal support and trying to be strategic and tactical about that. The task in part is to sharpen our ability to communicate the value and strength of the work that we do. We make a difference. I am optimistic in that I do think when you have these uncertainties there are opportunities. And that’s back to the importance of our process of creating a new strategic plan that aligns with the University’s roadmap but making it our own. It will sharpen our stories, and help us with the capital campaign and help us with regard to already emerging areas, often private sector foundations that align with our mission. We have some success stories already in the college of new kinds of support, resources, and money coming in to support the work we do. That’s the task for us—figuring out how to get ourselves ready for new partnerships accessing competitively different sources of support to do what we do. But I think the opportunities will be there and we’re well positioned to capitalize on them.
What makes you excited to come to work each day? What motivates you?
The people. We talk about ourselves as the People’s College. This is a humble position to be in. It’s daunting as I learn some of the ropes, but this is a committed group of people up and down the line with regard to our mission and trying to make a difference and make the work that we do matter. I see the University in a broader scope. I’m now sitting at a different level and can see how what we do in the college is well regarded and it matters. We try to be fiscally responsible stewards of our resources, and we try to make investments in areas that we care about, such as on the student front, and make ourselves an accessible, inclusive, positive environment. We care about innovation that’s going to improve lives and that kind of environment and the opportunity to be in a position of my role in it is humbling and it keeps me going.
Finally, if someone came up to you and asked, “What is CEHD? What is it all about?”, what would be your response?
I think it’s about improving lives. We are the only college of education in the state at a Research 1 institution. That’s unique. What it’s all about is the innovation that comes from the creativity of our faculty, students, and staff funneling toward one singularity, improving lives. And my vision, besides trying to be a responsible steward and creating a strategic roadmap, is how do we reduce the translational gap between the time somebody discovers something from their research and getting that into the communities that need it and where it matters to improve outcomes. Whether it’s in the children’s mental health space or developmental disabilities or child welfare or healthy lifespan development, the People’s College means we are committed to improving people’s lives, being accessible, being inclusive, being innovative, and taking ideas and getting them to impact. And the steps therein are what we spend our time trying to do.
–Kevin Moe