Meet the ALAE Leadership Team:

Amy Pickard is the ALAE SIG Chair. Amy is an Assistant Professor of Adult Education at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a qualitative researcher whose interests center on policy, equity and adult literacy education. As a former adult literacy and ABE teacher, she is interested in supporting adult learners to define their own learning needs and improving policy and programs to better meet these needs. She is particularly interested in systems-level understandings of ABE, reading and writing instruction in ABE spaces, self-directed learning of ABE students, and digital engagement of ABE teachers and adult learners.

Elizabeth L. Tighe is the Program Chair and is looking forward to an exciting 2027 Annual Meeting. Liz is a Professor of Psychology and the Assistant Director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University (GSU). Her research focuses on the literacy skills and instructional needs of struggling adult readers. She has published and presented work on individual differences in adults’ component reading skills, assessment and measurement of reading constructs, classification of learning disabilities, and using educational technology in adult literacy classrooms.  Her work has been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, National Institutes of Health, and AERA. She has also tutored in multiple adult literacy classrooms in Florida and Massachusetts and has also taught high school equivalency courses in Arizona.

Leah Katherine Saal is the Secretary/Treasurer. Leah is a professor of literacy at Loyola University Maryland, School of Education. Passionate about lifelong learning, she has over 20 years of experience designing, teaching, researching, and evaluating educational and training programs for adolescents and adults with and without disabilities in schools and organizations.

Lindsay McHolme is the chair of the ALAE Awards Committee. Lindsay is an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Georgia State University’s (GSU) Adult Literacy Research Center (ALRC). Her community-engaged research focuses on multilingual education in adult and secondary spaces. She holds a professional teaching certificate in secondary English Language Arts with a certification in ESOL and has taught ABE and ELL adult learners in multiple settings in Michigan, high school EFL at a Spanish/English bilingual school in Honduras, and middle school ELA at a Spanish/English bilingual school in Michigan. She was also the director of a county-wide literacy coalition for all ages for several years, emphasizing the impact of community-engaged scholarship. 

Amber Rosamond is the Graduate Student Liaison. Amber will be working to find ways to connect graduate students to the SIG and she will also manage a LinkedIn page for us.

Margaret Patterson is the Website Manager. Margaret is a Senior Researcher with Research Allies for Lifelong Learning in Virginia (www.researchallies.org). She has served in an ALAE SIG officer role for more than a decade and looks forward to keeping you informed about the latest SIG happenings.