MaPSAC’s Hadley speaker series to present Penn State’s Wilson Okello

The 2024 Richard A. Hadley Professional Development Series presentation, hosted by the Management and Professional Staff Advisory Committee and scheduled for March 28, will feature Wilson Okello, an assistant professor of education at Penn State University.

The event, set for 1-2 p.m. ET, will be hosted in a virtual format through Zoom. Registration is required, and registrants will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. All university staff are welcome to attend with supervisor approval.

In addition to his role as a professor, Okello is a research associate at Penn State’s Center for the Study of Higher Education and director of the Black Study in Education Lab — a research and praxis hub concerned with exploring the potentialities of Blackness in educational research, practice and policy. 

A transdisciplinary artist and scholar, Okello draws on Black critical theories to advance research on knowledge production and human development. His work focuses on how Black critical approaches make visible the epistemic foundations that structure what it means to be human and imagining otherwise possibilities for Black being therein.

Okello has more than 40 scholarly publications in venues like the Journal of College Student Development, Race Ethnicity and Education, and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. He is co-editor of “Trauma-informed practice in student affairs: Multidimensional considerations for care, healing, and wellbeing” in New Directions for Student Services and author of a forthcoming text with SUNY Press that explores the potential of centering Blackness in student development theory.  

Among other early career awards, he was selected as a 2023 Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) Early Career Award recipient, received the 2022-23 Council on Ethnic Participation Mildred Garcia Award for Exemplary Scholarship by ASHE and was named a 2022 Emerging Scholar by the American College Personnel Association. 

Questions for Okello can be emailed in advance to mapsac-pd@purdue.edu. The discussion will be moderated to minimize interruptions during the event.

The Hadley series is named for Richard A. Hadley, a Purdue alumnus and past Purdue employee who was a founding member of the Administrative and Professional Staff Advisory Committee, the predecessor of MaPSAC. Hadley was a senior mechanical engineer at Purdue for nearly 25 years before his death in 1993. The Hadley series is presented each spring and is intended to provide career enrichment for university staff members. 

The series is supported by the Richard Hadley Memorial MaPSAC Fund for Staff Development. Gifts to that fund, including gifts on the Purdue Day of Giving, will help continue the series.