Faculty and Staff

Dr. Iris Wilkinson

Dr. Iris Wilkinson is currently an Associate Professor. Iris played a major lead in creating the department and served as its chairperson for 12 years. Wilkinson received both her doctoral degree in Higher Education Administration and her Master's degree in Counseling from the University of Kansas. She served as Secretary for the Board of Directors of the Council on Standards in Human Service Education. She was a member of the Board of Directors for the National Organization for Human Service Education for eight years. Dr. Wilkinson worked with alcohol and drug abuse professionals in Russia for over 5 years at the Post-Graduate Institute for Medical and Emergency Problems in the Department of Narcology and Psychotherapy with the Ministry of Health, in part through a Fulbright Scholarship. Currently Wilkinson is the President of the International Coalition of Addiction Studies Education. She has also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Distance Education at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Wilkinson is also serving on the board of the Native American Wellness Association. Wilkinson advises all of the 2+2 and distant students majoring in Human Services, so please feel free to contact her by mail at iris.wilkinson@washburn.edu or by phone at 1-785-670-1010 x.1536.

Dr. Diane McMillen

Dr. Diane McMillen is an Associate Professor. She has been teaching in Human Services for 30 years. Diane started her teaching career at Ottawa University (Ottawa, Kansas) where she developed the Human Services program and taught for 11 years. She began teaching at Washburn in the fall of 1990 and has been there the last 19 years. If you were to ask her about the last 27 years, she would say, "Teaching is the greatest job I have ever had, I never thought working for a living would be so rewarding!" She earned her Ph.D. in Social Work from Kansas University in 1998, where she conducted research in the area of prevention, especially related to the idea of linking social services to schools. Her dissertation focused on enhancing services for children and their families. She has served on the board for the National Organization of Human Services for seven years and currently functions as the national membership chair. She remains actively involved in various community service and community development projects. In the last few years she has been consulting at a girls' group home where she meets monthly with the staff. Most recently she has enjoyed a sabbatical of seven months to do research on a new method of prevention known as Health Realization. She traveled across the United States and visiting a variety of programs that use this approach in their work with people and are seeing remarkable results. She has offered a course in Advanced Prevention/Health Realization as part of the Human Service curriculum, which she has dearly enjoyed teaching and has been well received by the students.

Dr. Deborah Altus

Dr. Deborah Altus is a professor. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology (with a focus in behavior analysis) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Gerontology. She worked as a Gerontological researcher for nearly 10 years, serving as an assistant research professor at the University of Kansas and as an associate professor at Kansas State University before joining the Washburn faculty in 2000. Her main interests are in aging and mental health (dementia care) and group living arrangements (e.g., co-ops, CoHousing, intergenerational home-sharing, communal living). She has also studied postpartum depression and served as the Kansas Coordinator for Postpartum Support International. Dr. Altus is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, former President of the national Communal Studies Association, board member of the International Communal Studies Association, and former treasurer of the Behavioral Gerontology interest group of the Association for Behavior Analysis. She has also served on a number of state-wide organizations including the Kansas Arthritis Steering Committee, the Kansas Elder Count committee, the Kansas Mental Health and Aging committee, as co-chair of the public engagement task force for the Kansas Living Initiatives for End-of-Life Care Project, as an advisory board member for the Center on Aging at Kansas State University and community advisory board member for the Center on Aging at KU Medical Center. She is an editorial board member for the journal Communal Societies, and for Communities, Journal of Cooperative Living, and has served as a reviewer for a variety of scholarly journals, presses and granting agencies. She has authored numerous journal articles and chapters in the areas of Gerontology, Behavior Analysis, and Communal Living, and is widely known as an authority on intentional communities inspired by B. F. Skinner's novel, Walden Two.

Dr. Kayla Waters

Dr. Kayla Waters is an Assistant Professor.  She earned her Ph.D. in School Psychology from the University of Iowa.  She interned at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the Kennedy Krieger Institute working with children and adolescents with behavior problems, neurological disorders, and chronic illness.  Her post-doctoral training was through the A.I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Newark, Delaware working on a medical rehabilitation unit for children with brain injuries.  She has also worked in public school settings addressing behavioral and learning problems, and overseeing a Response to Intervention program designed to address learning and behavior problems before they develop into significant disabilities.   Her professional interests include youth issues, chronic illness and disabilities, parent training, academic interventions for students with learning difficulties, functional behavioral assessment, and neuropsychological disorders in children and adolescents.    

Dr. Brian Ogawa

Dr. Brian Ogawa is the department chair of Human Services and an associate professor at Washburn University, where he has taught since 2001. Dr.Ogawa's areas of expertise include victimology, victim/survivor services, post trauma, cultural competence, and hate and bias crimes. He is internationally recognized as the primary educator and practitioner of Morita therapy in the United States. Dr. Ogawa was most recently Director of the Crime Victims' Institute, the state research, evaluation, and policy program for crime victim rights and services in the Office of the Texas Attorney General, and Director of the National Academy for Victim Studies, Department of Criminal Justice, University of North Texas. The Academy was a collaboration between the university and the National Office of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) to provide academic instruction, research, and continuing education on crime victimization. Dr. Ogawa has been the director of a prosecutor-based victim/witness assistance division; a university-based researcher in mental health, public health, social welfare, and behavioral sciences; youth volunteer services director; deputy medical examiner in behavioral analysis; and counselor in private practice. His education includes a Doctor of Ministry in counseling from San Francisco Theological Seminary (doctoral dissertation on the adaptation of Morita therapy to the West); Masters of Divinity in theology (with a subset in psychology) from Fuller Theological Seminary; and Bachelors in social sciences from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Ogawa has been a consultant on many national research and curriculum projects, including the National Institute of Justice/Urban Institute"Evaluation of VOCA Victim Assistance and Compensation Programs" and the seminal US Department of Justice project, "New Directions from the Field: Victim Rights and Services for the 21st Century," of which he was a committee chair, final reviewer, and signatory. He has served on numerous national boards and committees, including the National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women for the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services; Center for Substance Abuse Prevention of the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; Executive Committee of the National Organization for Victim Assistance; National Victim Assistance Standards Consortium;and Victim Issues Committee of the American Probation and Parole Association. In 1995, Dr. Ogawa received the nation's highest award for service to crime victims, the National Crime Victim Service Award, presented by the President and the Attorney General in ceremonies at the White House. He is the author of a number of journal articles, training curricula, and the following books: "Walking on Eggshells" (Bent Tree Press/Kendall Hunt), which describes Morita therapy for abused women; To "Tell the Truth" (Volcano Press), written to assist children through the criminal justice system; "Color of Justice, 2nd Edition" (Allyn and Bacon), the landmark study on minority victimization; and "A River to Live By: The 12 Life Principles of Morita Therapy" (Xlibris/Random House).