The Team & Contributors

A theory is a long conversation among friends.

Advocating Student-within-Environment theory has never been the work of one person. ASE is the ongoing, collective project of a community of scholars, counselors, teachers, parents, and students who have tested, refined, and lived it across schools, clinics, and kitchen tables for more than twenty-five years.

The Academy Principals

The work is held in partnership.

Matthew Lemberger-Truelove
Founder & Director

Matthew Lemberger-Truelove, Ph.D.

Matthew is the founder of The ASE Academy and the originator of ASE theory. For more than twenty-five years, he has worked to advance the ideas and practice of ASE in and beyond schools. He holds the Letitia Neag Morgan Endowed Chair and Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He has produced three books, more than 80 academic journal articles (including multiple randomized controlled trials of ASE in practice), and secured more than 6 million dollars in funding to support children and schools. Through ASE Academy, Matthew works to give youth, educators, counselors, and families the language and practice to meet frustration with curiosity, disconnection with genuine relationship, and helplessness with the confidence to act.

Contributing Scholars & Fellow Travelers

A community of research and practice.

These colleagues have shaped ASE theory through co-authored studies, collaborative fieldwork, doctoral mentorship, editorial partnership, and years of the kind of intellectual friendship that actually makes a body of work possible. Their affiliations are their own; their work here is named in gratitude.

HB

Hannah Bowers Parker, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Florida Atlantic University · School counseling outcomes

Dr. Bowers Parker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Counselor Education at Florida Atlantic University, where her research centers on school counseling program outcomes, student wellness, and evidence-based practice. Her longstanding co-authorship with Matthew has helped build the empirical backbone of ASE, particularly in elementary and middle-school contexts where relational, environmental approaches most visibly shape student well-being and achievement.

BH

Brian Hutchison, Ph.D.

Career counseling · Advocating Workers-within-Environment

Dr. Hutchison extended ASE's logic into career counseling through his work on Advocating Workers-within-Environment, demonstrating that the theory's relational and environmental claims translate directly into adult vocational life and workplace formation.

CM

Citlali Molina, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Texas Christian University · Counselor education & culturally responsive practice

Dr. Molina is an Assistant Professor of Counseling and Counselor Education at Texas Christian University's College of Education. Her scholarship and clinical practice attend to the cultural, linguistic, and community contexts in which children and families live — bringing first-person, qualitative depth to ASE's study of how young people form themselves within their ecologies.

IL

Ian Levy, Ph.D.

Educator–counselor identity · Humanistic counseling

Dr. Levy's collaborative work with Matthew on the educator–counselor as a unified, non-dual identity has become a keystone of ASE theory, informing the Academy's current language of paideia and the dissolution of the counselor-teacher divide.

HK

Hyunhee Kim, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University School of Education · School counseling & student wellbeing

Dr. Kim is an Assistant Professor in the School Counseling program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. Her research examines culturally responsive school counseling practices, multi-tiered systems of support, and the mental-health and academic outcomes of students in under-resourced schools — work that sharpens ASE's commitments to equity, context, and the conditions under which young people can flourish.

BZ

Brett Zyromski, Ph.D.

School counseling efficacy · Research leadership

Dr. Zyromski's research leadership in school counseling has shaped the ecosystem in which ASE has grown, and his collaborations with ASE-adjacent scholars have helped position the theory within contemporary conversations about measurable, culturally responsive counseling practice.

And many more

The practitioners who have made ASE real.

Beyond the named scholars above, ASE theory owes its depth to hundreds of school counselors, classroom teachers, administrators, parents, and students whose willingness to try a relational, environmental approach to education has kept the theory honest. A theory without practitioners is only a manuscript. The practitioners — many of whom remain anonymous in the literature — are the actual authors of whatever ASE has become.

If you would like to be listed among the Academy's practitioner community, or to correspond with other practitioners who are working with ASE in their settings, please reach out or join us.