Nurul Hassan is a STEM educator and education researcher whose work focuses on identity, equity, and participation in science education. His scholarship explores how students navigate the cultural and institutional dimensions of STEM learning and how educational systems can create more inclusive pathways into science. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.
Nurul’s academic trajectory reflects an interdisciplinary commitment to both science and education. His doctoral training integrates science education, curriculum studies, and sociocultural perspectives on learning, allowing him to examine how educational environments shape students’ engagement with STEM and their developing relationships with science. Through his doctoral work, he has developed expertise in qualitative and ethnographic research methods that enable the study of learning as it unfolds in real educational contexts.
Before beginning his doctoral studies, Nurul developed extensive experience as a science educator in secondary education. He taught science for several years at international secondary schools, working within both public education systems and internationally recognized curricula. These experiences exposed him to diverse learning environments and helped shape his interest in understanding how institutional structures, curricular expectations, and classroom practices influence students’ engagement with science.
In Canada, Nurul has continued to expand his teaching and curriculum development experience across higher education institutions in the Greater Toronto Area. Over nearly a decade of postsecondary teaching, he has taught core and applied science courses at universities and colleges, designing laboratory-based learning experiences that integrate experimental inquiry, collaborative investigation, and problem-solving. His courses emphasize scientific reasoning and encourage students to approach science as a process of inquiry rather than simply a body of knowledge.
Nurul’s teaching philosophy centers on creating inclusive and intellectually engaging learning environments that support diverse learners in developing confidence and agency in science. He integrates inquiry-driven pedagogy, active learning strategies, and reflective practices to encourage students to connect scientific ideas to broader social and real-world contexts. Through these approaches, he seeks to foster learning spaces where students from varied backgrounds can see themselves as legitimate participants in scientific communities.
Alongside teaching, Nurul contributes to scholarly conversations in science education through research, conference presentations, and collaborative academic engagement. His work addresses issues of STEM identity, equitable participation in STEM learning, and the preparation of educators to support diverse learners in STEM classrooms.
By bringing together experiences as a scientist, educator, and researcher, Nurul seeks to bridge educational research and classroom practice. His long-term goal is to contribute to the preparation of future science educators and to the development of STEM learning environments that cultivate curiosity, belonging, and inclusive participation in science education.
Thalia Tom is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and a Graduate School Endowed Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she uses quantitative methods to investigate neighborhood stratification and educational inequality. In her time at USC, Thalia has served as a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Social Research, where she helped design surveys that examine livability, affordability, mobility, and sustainability in Los Angeles County, as well as the Segregation Tracking Project, a comprehensive source of data on residential and school segregation across the U.S. Prior to her doctoral studies, Thalia earned a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Davis.
As a first-generation and multiracial student whose name is often mispronounced, Thalia is acutely aware of how our identities may make us more or less likely to participate or feel that we belong in academic settings. Given this knowledge, she strives to create inclusive environments through her service, mentoring, and teaching.
John “Johnnie” Yang is a PhD candidate in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the son of Hmong refugees who resettled in the United States after the Secret War in Laos. Growing up in a refugee household shaped by histories of migration, resilience, and community care shaped his early understanding of education as both a personal opportunity and a collective responsibility.
Yang is a Gates Millennium Scholar and a Fulbright U.S. Student Program alumnus. As a Fulbright scholar in Laos, he spent a year teaching English and living in Luang Prabang, an experience that allowed him to reconnect with the broader cultural and historical context of the Hmong diaspora while gaining a global perspective on education and wellbeing.
At UCLA, Yang has held teaching assistantships across multiple departments, including Education and Asian American Studies. In these roles he has supported undergraduate courses on higher education, history of race and ethnicity, and student development. He has also held research positions across several interdisciplinary teams, including projects in education and psychology as well as work with the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), where he contributed to research on college student experiences and national survey data.
Yang’s scholarly work has appeared in several peer-reviewed publications, including New Directions for Higher Education, the Journal of American College Health, and the Journal of Homosexuality. More recently, his work explores how colleges and universities can better support student wellbeing and how educational environments shape students’ broader life experiences.
In addition to his academic work, Yang is a longtime practitioner of yoga and integrates movement, mindfulness, breath, reflective journaling, and other contemplative practices into his teaching and community engagement. Across his research and educational work, he is interested in how higher education can support students not only academically, but as whole people navigating complex personal and social worlds.
Passion Lord is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Higher Education and Organizational Change program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She earned her bachelor’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from Pepperdine University and holds two master’s degrees in Higher Education from UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. As a first-generation college graduate and L.A. native, she is passionate about the recruitment, retention, and persistence of underrepresented communities in higher education. Her current research explores how social media influences prospective Black students’ decisions to enroll at an institution. Passion has leveraged her business background in various professional and volunteer roles within the education sector. She also serves as a Teaching Fellow for the Bunche Fellows Program, where she assists undergraduate students with their research projects and presentations. These projects are showcased at two university-wide research symposiums: the Undergraduate Research Showcase and the Bunche Fellows Research Symposium.
Emma Keller (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Developmental & Psychological Sciences at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, with a specialization in Race, Inequality, & Language in Education. She is a proud alumna of the University of Virginia, where she earned degrees in Youth & Social Innovation and English Literature. Emma’s scholarship is rooted in both Critical Multiracial Studies and lived experience: growing up as a Black mixed-race woman in southern Virginia, she learned early how racial identity can feel both imposed and unsettled across contexts, shaped by social expectations as well as self-understanding.
Emma’s research centers the experiences of Black mixed-race young people, with a focus on ethnic-racial identity development and family ethnic-racial socialization processes. Her dissertation examines sibling relationships as key sites of identity influence, and develops a theory-driven measure of sibling ethnic-racial socialization to document how siblings contribute to racialized meaning-making and psychological well-being. Across her work, Emma is committed to understanding and easing the identity-related pressures navigated by Black mixed-race youth, by strengthening supports that promote pride, reduce racial stress, and inform identity-affirming interventions.
Gabriela R. Flores is a proud daughter of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Chicana/o Studies with a minor in Educational Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2019. Gabriela was driven by a deep commitment to expand research on the Latinx community and set her sights on a graduate degree in Sociology, a path that as a first-generation college student came without a roadmap. Without guidance from her family or immediate circle, she was rejected by several Ph.D. programs. However, Gabriela made a defining decision and did not abandon her goal but rather built a stronger foundation to reach it. She strategically redirected her journey and earned a Master's degree in Sociology from California State University, Northridge as a deliberate step toward her doctorate. Rather than waiting for the support she needed, Gabriela created it by cultivating mentorships and building a network that had been absent during her undergraduate years. Her commitment to excellence was recognized through the prestigious Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, which supported her doctoral aspirations and provided invaluable research experience alongside faculty.
Upon completing her Master's, Gabriela applied to multiple Ph.D. programs and received acceptance along with competitive funding. Five years into her doctoral program, she is not only advancing rigorous research in Sociology but actively mentoring undergraduate and graduate peers who follow in her footsteps. The support she once had to seek on her own, she now generously gives back. Embodying the kind of scholar and mentor she once needed. Gabriela’s dedication to her community extends beyond mentorship. For four years, she served as the graduate student representative for the Institutional Review Board, championing the rights and welfare of human subjects in research, with a particular commitment to protecting vulnerable populations, including local Spanish-speaking communities, low educational attainment individuals, and farmworkers who are often underrepresented and underserved in academic research. Her presence at the table ensured that the Latinx community’s dignity and voice remained central to ethical research practices on campus. Gabriela’s scholarly contributions have earned her departmental research funding and opportunities to present at conferences. She has also been selected for competitive academic career development programs, further marking her commitment to excellence in the field.
Miso Kwak is a Ph.D. candidate in Special Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Miso earned her B.A. in Psychology with minors in Disability Studies and Education Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and earned her Ed.M. in Education Policy and Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Informed by her lived experience of emigrating to the United States as a teenager and navigating the educational systems as a blind student and educator, she is committed to centering the perspectives of disabled students and highlighting the ways in which disability intersects with every facet of social experience. To that end, she recently published her debut children’s book titled More Than What Eyes See: A Book About Blindness. She also works as a graduate student intern at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Disability Cultural Center for which she was selected as the Graduate Student Employee of the Year in 2025.
Prior to starting her doctoral studies, she completed a Fulbright fellowship in Izmir, Türkiye, teaching English as a foreign language to university students. She also has professional experiences in doing disability policy research and advising disabled students as they transition from high school to college.
Angie Kim (she/her) is a 1.5-generation immigrant woman from Korea who grew up as a settler on the lands of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation (San Gabriel Valley, CA) and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. Central to her research is cultivating individual, relational, and organizational capacities to build life-affirming workplace and educational environments for systemically marginalized individuals in higher education. Her dissertation examines how staff members use relationships and networks to enact everyday acts of refusal and organizational change.
Angie contributes to the Change Agents Shaping Campus Diversity and Equity (CASCaDE) research projects at the Phillip J. Bowman Center for Scholarship to Practice at the University of Michigan and the Promoting At-Promise Student Success projects at the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. Angie also serves as a Graduate Student Instructor Consultant at the Center for the Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan.
Prior to pursuing her doctorate, Angie worked as a Residence Hall Assistant Director in Residential Life and Housing Services and Associate Director for Inclusive Engagement and Student Life in the School of Social Work, both at New York University. She earned her M.A. in Higher Education & Student Affairs also from New York University and B.A. in Cognitive Science with a minor in Organizational Management from the University of Southern California.
Jonathan Pérez is a first-generation doctoral candidate in Education at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on critical theory and the critical studies of race, class, and gender. He received his M.Ed. in the sociology of education from the Teachers College, Columbia University, and his MAT in secondary education from the University of Louisville. Jonathan additionally holds a BA in Sociology and Latin American & Iberian Studies from the University of Richmond. He first started teaching in Louisville, Kentucky, at a high school for parenting and pregnant teenagers and has since taught middle school in New York City, NY, and currently teaches dual-enrollment Ethnic Studies in Oakland, CA. Jonathan is also the Associate Director of Academics for The School of The New York Times and lectures at San Francisco State University.
After receiving two-consecutive Fulbright grants from the US State Department to explore the potential of community-informed curricula, where he worked with elementary schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Jonathan dedicated his work to exploring the transformative power curricula have on students’ learning experiences. Hailing from Richmond, VA, Jonathan comes to California to uphold the legacy of the Third World Liberation Front, who fought for an Ethnic Studies curriculum that seeks to develop new consciousnesses by centering lived experiences and resistant histories.
Jonathan’s scholarship explores possibilities for the Ethnic Studies curriculum to disrupt schools as a racializing project. Specifically, he draws on Youth Participatory Action Research, cultural-historical activity theory, and raceclass analysis to empirically explore how California’s Ethnic Studies curriculum provides an opening for students to engage in transgressive-racialization—the act of disrupting racialization and experimenting with different ways of being otherwise. Jonathan identifies as a transgressive scholar whose work identifies the instructive value of challenging dominant boundaries, structures, and ways of knowing for a more just society.
Davis Vo (he/him/his) is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), School of Education & Information Studies (Ed&IS) and a National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Dissertation Fellow (2025). Prior to his doctoral studies, Davis spent over 10 years in advising, teaching, and research roles across California's education system: in the non-profit sector, as well as the K-12, community college, and public/private university systems. He holds a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), a M.Ed. from the University of Southern California (USC) Rossier School of Education, and a M.S. from the UCLA Department of Statistics & Data Science.
Through his research, Davis examines the conditions that foster improved education access, success, and equity for historically minoritized communities using institution-, state-, and national-level datasets. Broadly, he is interested in three interconnected lines of research: (1) the role of educational practices and policies in shaping patterns of social stratification and (in)equality/equity, (2) the academic and labor market experiences, outcomes, and trajectories for students from historically minoritized communities, and (3) the micro- and macro-level structures (e.g., economic, geographic, and social contexts) that situate how individuals and organizations behave. His dissertation explores the implications of community colleges' adoption of bachelor's degree programs on educational access, success, and equity.
Carlos Irizarry is a third-year doctoral candidate in Curriculum, Culture, and Communities at Loyola University Chicago, currently conducting dissertation research on how tabletop role-playing games function as transformative learning environments for young adult men. He anticipates defending in Spring 2027 and is concurrently completing graduate certificates in Organizational Evaluation and Higher Education.
He grew up across Chicago's South and West Sides, the child of immigrant family and wonderfully pluralist communities. From them he inherited a lasting commitment to equity and justice, and the wisdom that education begets opportunity and opportunity is freedom. He learned early that science, art, and expression can be woven together marvelously wherever there is learning.
He spent twelve years teaching middle school science and language arts on the northeast side of Chicago in some of the most genuinely diverse schools in the nation. Working alongside refugee and immigrant families there was a privilege that shaped his outlook as an educator. His classrooms were deliberately speculative and interdisciplinary. He guided students toward developing their STEM, argumentative writing and speaking, and interpersonal skills by having them resolve science fiction-inspired scenarios, like designing a multi-generational space colony ship, as if the problems were real and the stakes were high.
In 2015, he left the classroom to become a stay-at-home parent. During that time, he founded Luma Iluna Educational Consulting as a way to stay connected to his community in Chicago's western suburbs. Through that work, he advised teachers on trauma-informed instruction and AI-resistant pedagogy, and worked directly with young adults and their families navigating the hidden curriculum of the college application and enrollment process.
He is a member of AERA and AEA, and brings those organizational evaluation commitments into program design at inception. At the core of his work is a conviction that people develop rigorous thinking not by inheriting arguments but by being given experiences where they are cultivated naturally. Good pedagogy is the deliberate design of those conditions. He is building toward a faculty position where curriculum design, justice-oriented pedagogy, and transformative learning environments are not separate scholarly interests but a single integrated practice accountable to students and society.
Maegan Arney's experiences as both an Educational Psychology Ph.D. candidate and a public school teacher have prepared her to pursue research that reduces inequality and promotes belonging for students and teachers whose belonging is most in doubt. Her motivation for this work is rooted in both her training and her lived experience as a person of color and a first-generation, biracial student navigating predominantly white educational spaces. These experiences inform her commitment to research that examines how marginalized students can come to see themselves as a fit in educational settings in which they may question their sense of belonging.
Arney is a 5th year Educational Psychology PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis. She studies how structural inequalities shape students’ psychological experiences and decisions, with a particular focus on strengthening students’ sense of belonging — especially for those whose belonging is most in doubt, such as students from socioeconomic disadvantage or first-generation college students. She utilizes mixed methods to study anticipated belonging — whether students see themselves as fitting in within educational environments before they get there — and how that shapes their academic engagement, persistence, and decision-making. This work helps her to develop targeted interventions for schools that can reframe cultural narratives to help marginalized students to rightfully see their identities and experiences as assets that can help them thrive.
Joana Nana Serwaa Akrofi is an occupational therapist, scholar, and educator whose work explores how occupational therapy can be reimagined through African and Indigenous ways of knowing. She is currently a PhD candidate in Occupational Therapy at New York University Steinhardt, where her research focuses on developing an Afrocentric theoretical framework for occupational therapy grounded in the lived realities and knowledge systems of Ghana.
Her work is driven by a central question: What would occupational therapy look like if it were built from within African epistemologies rather than adapted from Western biomedical models? Guided by Afrocentricity and Critical Indigenous Theory, Nana examines how colonial histories have shaped what counts as legitimate knowledge in rehabilitation sciences—and how those boundaries can be expanded. Her dissertation brings together multiple strands of inquiry, including a scoping review of African-developed practice models, conversations with traditional healing practitioners, and participatory engagement with persons with disabilities, caregivers, and occupational therapists. Through this work, she highlights the ongoing relevance of Indigenous healing practices and their potential to inform more culturally grounded, contextually responsive care.
Alongside her academic work, Nana serves as an Occupational Therapy Supervisor at the Hebrew Institute’s Developmental Center in Brooklyn, where she leads school-based pediatric services. Her clinical practice centers on collaboration, regulation, and participation, with an emphasis on supporting children within their everyday environments. This dual role as researcher and clinician shapes her commitment to bridging theory and practice in ways that are both rigorous and meaningful.
Nana also serves as Vice President (Programmes) for the Occupational Therapy Africa Regional Group, where she contributes to initiatives that strengthen the profession across the continent. Her scholarship has been supported by the Elizabeth Casson Trust, and she is currently preparing her work for publication.
Across her work, Nana is committed to advancing an occupational therapy that is not only culturally responsive but also recognizes and centers the knowledge systems of the communities it serves.
Rita Kamani-Renedo is a PhD Candidate in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education and Curriculum and Teacher Education at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Broadly, Rita’s research examines critical pedagogical approaches and the education of multilingual, racially marked, and im/migrant and transnational youth. She employs critical and ethnographic methods and community-engaged approaches to explore two interconnected research strands. First, she facilitates and examines communities of practice among educators seeking to teach towards more socially just relations. Second, her scholarship counters deficit-based discourses regarding the literacies, languages, and political lives of im/migrant and multilingual youth.
Her dissertation is a unique synthesis of these two research strands. She investigates the perspectives of teachers as they imagine and enact Ethnic Studies curriculum for recently arrived im/migrant youth (commonly referred to as “newcomers”), and she examines the literacies and languages of newcomers as they engage with concepts such as race, racism, empire, and solidarity. Focusing specifically on Latin American migrant youth who constituted the majority of the classrooms in her study, her work seeks to nuance our understanding of youth who are racialized as Latinx in the U.S. context, but who do not bring solely U.S.-based orientations to race, identity, and belonging to classrooms. The project zeros in on the nuances of cultivating critical pedagogical spaces, with recently arrived im/migrant youth and their teachers of color at the center. In examining the language, literacy, meaning-making, and curricular practices that emerged in these classrooms, she highlights the ways they served as sites of transnational racial theorizing. Her findings advance insights around the complexity of teaching im/migrant and transnational youth amidst intensifying anti-immigrant and racialized violence.
An interdisciplinary scholar, she draws on sociology, anthropology, critical theories, and Latin American and Latinx studies in her educational research. Prior to her doctoral studies, Rita spent over a decade teaching in various contexts, including K-12 settings, adult education, and teacher education, and organizing around educational, racial, and migrant justice. For five years, she was a humanities teacher at a public high school for multilingual newcomer youth in Brooklyn, New York. Her research has been supported by the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the Research, Action, and Impact for Strategic Engagement Fellowship, the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies, the Graduate School of Education’s Dissertation Support Grant, and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. Her work has been published in Research in the Teaching of English and The New Educator. She holds a BA in Educational Studies and Political Science from Swarthmore College and an MA in Bilingual/Bicultural Education from Teachers College.
Xiaomeng Huang is a PhD candidate in the Educational Communication and Technology program at New York University. She holds a Master of Education in Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard University. She is passionate about supporting students’ development of 21st-century skills (e.g., collaboration and communication) through technology-enhanced approaches that are scalable and actionable.
Xiaomeng’s research examines how multimodal AI (e.g., large language models, speech, and vision) can measure and support the development of college students’ collaboration skills, such as active listening. Challenging conventional approaches that equate participation with speaking alone, her work reconceptualizes equitable participation by focusing on how learners listen, interpret, and build on one another’s ideas. She develops theoretical frameworks, rigorous measurement models, and innovative multimodal AI-powered feedback systems that generate analytics-based, pedagogically grounded insights to support these complex skills.
Prior to her doctoral studies, Xiaomeng contributed to research projects at Harvard University and MIT, where she investigated how students develop transferable skills, such as scientific inquiry and spatial skills, through collaborative learning in AR/VR/MR environments.
Hunter Jones (she/her) is a third-year Ph.D. student at the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia (UGA). She was awarded a Presidential Graduate Fellowship from the University to pursue her doctoral studies. Prior to attending UGA, Hunter earned bachelor’s degrees in Human Development and Journalism from Washington State University. Additionally, she earned a master’s degree in Educational Studies with a concentration in Higher Education and Student Affairs from Ohio State University. As a second-generation college graduate, she has seen first-hand the impact that higher education attainment can have on individuals, families, and communities. Her belief that everyone who wants it should have access to quality higher education is what led her to her graduate studies.
Hunter’s research interests are at the intersection of race, class, and higher education. She is passionate about reducing inequities and expanding higher education access for marginalized communities. Hunter has assisted with research related to the experiences of Black students at predominantly white institutions, student financial and academic stress and wellbeing, and the impacts of tracking along the K-20 educational pipeline. She has presented scholarship at the Association for the Study of Higher Education annual conference as an active member of the organization.
In addition to her Ph.D., Hunter is pursuing a certificate in Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies from the Mary Frances Early College of Education at UGA. She has come to appreciate the ways that qualitative inquiry can provide nuance to phenomena present in the field of higher education. Hunter’s dissertation research is focused on the postsecondary pathways of African Americans with college educated parents. She is planning to conduct a qualitative study to explore the many career, educational, and career pathways that African Americans take after graduating from high school.
Ja’Nya Banks is a fifth-year PhD Candidate in the Education Policy, Politics and Leadership cluster at the Berkeley School of Education (BSE). Raised in the greater D.C. area, she spent her collegiate years interning for the U.S. Department of Justice This work jumpstarted an interest in analyzing federal, state and local policy. After graduating undergrad, Ja’Nya transitioned into a career as special education teacher in a predominantly Black and Latinx, Title I school, balancing issues of race, income, language, citizenship status, ability. These early experiences as a practitioner, observing the disparity between civil rights protections and losses from two sides of public service informed her research work on political threat and resource removal for vulnerable communities. During this time, Ja’Nya finished her master’s degree in Special Education, focusing on special education policy.
Her growing interest in formally studying education policy led her to complete a Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked as a research assistant COVID-19 education leadership study, and led racial-identity workshops for pre-service teachers of color earning their credential. In 2021 she started began her doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, balancing a research agenda that spanned racial, dis/ability, equity, access and advocacy topics. During her time at Cal, she has taught Critical Studies of Education for the undergraduate major, and taught as a teaching assistant for Contemporary Issues of Education.
BK Byun is a Ph.D. candidate in Higher Education at the University of Michigan. Her research examines how policies and organizational processes can be redesigned to support more equitable decision-making, with a focus on selective college admissions. Specifically, she studies how variation in admissions officers’ personal and professional backgrounds—in combination with organizational priorities and institutional routines—shape what happens at key decision points in ways that either expand or constrain opportunity for underrepresented and racially minoritized students.
Methodologically, she draws upon lab and field experiments, qualitative interviews, and computational social science methods to improve the field’s measurement of admissions practices that are difficult to capture through a single approach. In ongoing work, she combines in-depth qualitative interviews with a large-scale audit experiment involving admissions officers to test whether and how diversifying the current admissions workforce may support equitable recruitment, in an environment where many formal tools once used to advance diversity have been dismantled.
BK’s research has been published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, AERA Open, and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
Nicole Ngaosi is currently a doctoral candidate in the Program in Higher Education Leadership at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. Ngaosi's research interests focus on the intersections between shared governance, diversity initiatives, and institutional partnerships to enact organizational change. Her interests are largely informed by her personal and professional experiences working in Student Affairs, as well as her previous assistantships with Dr. Liliana Garces in examining how external pressures can shape postsecondary institutions' commitments to racial equity work, and with Dr. Victor Sáenz supporting the College of Education's Student Success, Community Engagement, and Administration.
Prior to attending UT, Ngaosi dedicated her full-time Student Affairs professional roles to supporting student retention at UCLA. At the UCLA Community Programs Office, the campus’ multicultural center, her portfolio oversaw a portion of the university's basic needs operations as well as its unique readmission pipeline program and affinity-based peer counseling efforts. Her work drew heavily on her background as a student organizer and her service on various university and systemwide committees.
A former community college transfer from Santa Monica College, Ngaosi obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Asian American Studies, Master of Arts in Asian American Studies, and Master of Social Welfare from UCLA.
Josefina Senese is a PhD candidate in Educational Policy Studies at Boston University. She holds an MA from the University of Notre Dame and a BA from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina).
Her research examines how school choice policies shape the educational trajectories of students with disabilities and multilingual learners. Drawing on longitudinal administrative data, she studies how these students move across public and private schools, access services, and experience support across instructional settings.
Josefina is a 2026–2027 AERA–NSF Dissertation Fellow and has previously received a Fulbright Fellowship, the APPAM Excellence, Equity & Inclusion Fellowship, and a Margaret McNamara Education Grant. Before joining BU, she worked in Washington, DC, with the Office of Learning and Impact at the Inter-American Foundation and with The Trust for the Americas at the Organization of American States.
Jermaine R. Howell (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education program at Michigan State University (MSU). His research focuses on equity and justice-oriented pedagogies in mathematics education.
Jermaine’s dissertation investigates Black elementary teachers’ sensemaking of asset-based pedagogies in mathematics education. His work was recently published in the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, which conceptualized equity-oriented practices of math teachers in urban classrooms (Howell & Orr, 2025).
He has served as the Chief Diversity Officer for the International Student Association at MSU. In this role, Jermaine collaborated with university leaders on multicultural and diversity initiatives to support the well-being of international students on campus. Jermaine currently serves as a mentor for undergraduate and graduate students in the Teacher Education Department at MSU. Within the College of Education at MSU, Jermaine has organized and facilitated several communities of practice with faculty members, staff, and graduate students that focused on culturally relevant pedagogy and justice-oriented practices in teaching and research.
Prior to pursuing his doctorate at MSU, Jermaine served as a global educator and an elementary school teacher in Jamaica and North Carolina. While teaching in North Carolina, he was awarded Teacher of the Year for his school and was a Teacher of the Year district finalist for the Wake County Public School System. Jermaine holds a Bachelor of Education degree in Primary Education (K-6) from the International University of the Caribbean, Jamaica, and a Master of Education degree in Curriculum, Instruction, and Developmental Supervision from North Carolina State University.
Monica Hernandez is a third-year doctoral student in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies department at UT San Antonio. She holds an M.Ed. in Higher Education Administration from UT San Antonio, an M.S. in Teaching, Secondary English from Fordham University, and dual B.A.s in English and Chicano Studies, with a minor in Black Studies, from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Prior to her doctoral journey, Monica navigated careers in both the corporate and non-profit sectors, including roles as an 8th grade English Language Arts teacher, technology public relations specialist, and communications specialist for education policy nonprofits. Additionally, she served as a school-to-career manager in economic development, leading work-based learning programming for youth and overseeing the design and implementation of high school internship programs. Together, these experiences exposed her to the complexities, nuances, and hidden curriculum that constrain historically marginalized students' access to high-wage careers.
Witnessing how historically marginalized students enter, or are prevented from entering, the labor market compelled Monica to return to academia to examine the organizational structures that shape that transition, especially the design of work-based learning pathways such as internships. As such, her research interests include Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), workforce development, STEM education, and social mobility of Latine students.
Monica's work is driven by a commitment to equity and social and economic mobility for marginalized communities. A first-generation college student, Monica will be the first person in her family to earn a doctoral degree.
Shanté Elliott is a Ph.D. candidate in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences Fellow. Her work focuses on improving educational outcomes for youth navigating foster care and housing instability.
She brings a scholar–practitioner background shaped by leadership across education, child welfare, and higher education systems. Previously, she served as Executive Director of TasselTurn Education, a national education technology organization that designed and scaled a virtual coaching platform serving more than 5,000 foster care–involved students annually, across five states and 20 school districts. Under her leadership, the organization secured over $5 million in funding and received national recognition.
Prior to her doctoral studies, Shanté served as a Presidential Fellow for the University of North Carolina System, where she advised system leadership on strategic initiatives across 17 campuses and led the design of a first-generation college access program. She is also a Medill Education Journalism Fellow, where she is developing public-facing scholarship that translates research on educational equity and foster youth into broader public discourse.
Faith D. Northern (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in Sociology of Education at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Her research examines antiblackness, diasporic identity, and structural inequality in higher education, with a particular focus on the experiences of Afro-Caribbean students in the United States.
Her work sits at the intersection of sociology of education, race and ethnic studies, and migration studies. She is particularly interested in how structural forms of antiblackness shape the educational trajectories, identity development, and institutional experiences of Black immigrant and diasporic students. Through her scholarship, she seeks to complicate dominant narratives that frame Black immigrant populations through deficit models or exceptionalist “immigrant success” narratives, instead highlighting the layered realities of racialization, cultural negotiation, and resistance that shape their educational lives.
Beyond her dissertation research, Faith is interested in questions of institutional belonging, diasporic identity formation, and the structural dimensions of race and difference in education policy. Her broader research agenda examines how institutions of higher education produce, sustain, and sometimes contest racial hierarchies, particularly for students whose identities traverse national, cultural, and diasporic boundaries .Faith holds a deep commitment to scholarship that is both theoretically rigorous and socially engaged. Her work aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Black diasporic experiences in education while informing institutional and policy conversations about equity, belonging, and justice in higher education.
In addition to her academic work, Faith serves as the Communications and Outreach Specialist at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, where she helps translate research into accessible formats for educators, policymakers, and community stakeholders. Through this role, she works to bridge the gap between academic scholarship and educational practice.
Anabella Afra Boateng is a 4th-year doctoral candidate in the Sociology of Education program at NYU Steinhardt. She is also a NYLON fellow at the NYU Institute of Public Knowledge and a key collaborator at the JET Computing Lab at UC San Diego. Before pursuing her PhD, she played an integral role in setting up a girls-only Advanced Level STEM school in her home country, Ghana, which serves female high school students throughout Africa. In addition, she has worked with acclaimed non-profit youth educational institutions in New York City to advance their teaching and learning objectives. She holds a Master’s degree in Educational Leadership from Soka University of America and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana.
Shanae Stover is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Georgia State University and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Her work focuses on health inequality and the structural conditions that shape access to care and economic stability in marginalized communities.
Her research and professional experiences center on how individuals navigate healthcare and social service systems while managing chronic illness and persistent resource constraints. She is particularly interested in how these systems operate in practice and how gaps in formal support shape everyday life.
Her work is informed by extensive applied research experience. She has contributed to multiple large-scale projects, including a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation–funded study examining housing mobility and health outcomes, as well as community-based research on neighborhood conditions and health in Atlanta. Across these projects, she has conducted in-depth qualitative interviews and engaged directly with participants navigating complex institutional systems.
In addition to her academic work, Shanae is the founder of Holistic Community Health, a community-based initiative in Atlanta focused on addressing health-related social needs and gaps in mental health support. As a clinician, she works directly with individuals seeking care and assistance, an experience that informs her research and strengthens her commitment to community-engaged and policy-relevant scholarship.
Shanae has nearly a decade of experience supporting undergraduate and graduate education and has served as an instructor of record for courses including Introduction to Sociology and Social Problems. Her teaching emphasizes critical engagement and helping students connect sociological concepts to real-world issues. She has completed Georgia State University’s Certificate of Excellence in College Teaching.
Her broader interests include the sociology of health and illness, race and ethnic relations, social inequality, and qualitative research. Her work is grounded in a commitment to advancing research that informs policy and improves access to care and resources in marginalized communities.
Rosa Angela Calosso (she/her/ella) is a doctoral candidate in the Urban Education program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Born and raised in Queens, NY, to Dominican and Salvadoran parents, her upbringing informed a strong understanding of immigration issues, Blackness, and gendered politics, leading her to be part of a couple of immigrant-centered projects. In the last four years, she has served as a participatory action researcher in immigrant communities in the Bronx, facilitating information sessions for teacher educators and candidates on incorporating topics related to immigration into the classroom. Most recently, she has co-curated an immigration literature guide for PK-12 students, highlighting the transformative power of stories centered on immigration. Additionally, she supports teacher education faculty and programs that instill computer-digital literacy praxis and tools through projects such as CUNY Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CUNY-CITE). Rosa’s dissertation research examines how Black Dominican women utilize social media as a tool for community building, educational space, and critical reflection and resistance. Rosa’s work highlights Black Dominican women’s ability to teach, cultivate community, and resist institutional ‘isms in an age when mainstream media uses social media users’ content to discuss global political discourses and explicate sociopolitical events.
Shari-Lee Carter is a trained teacher and scholar pursuing a doctoral degree in International Education at New York University. Her research examines how Jamaica’s public debt and austerity measures shape the personal and professional lives of public-sector women teachers. Grounded in theories of political economy (including feminist and critical-cultural perspectives), her work explores how women teachers, positioned at the front lines of Jamaica's post-colonial nation-building project, navigate the simultaneous pressures of economic policies and education reform.
Born and raised in rural Jamaica by a public school teacher, Shari-Lee witnessed firsthand how economic policies have flesh-and-blood implications both within and beyond the classroom. This perspective informs her scholarly work and commitment to equity in education. With over a decade of classroom experience, she has developed a deep understanding of the global and local dimensions of education policy and reform. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked in Japan with the Okayama, Yamaguchi, and Kurashiki Boards of Education as a Native English Teacher, where she supported the development of programs that strengthened English Language teaching and learning. She also taught at both a technical and traditional high school in Jamaica, working alongside dedicated teachers who navigate public school resource constraints to advance Jamaica’s welfare.
Shari-Lee earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from the University of the West Indies, Mona, and a Master's degree in International and Comparative Education from the University of Leicester. Her professional and lived experiences have strengthened her commitment to improving the conditions of teachers and, by extension, student learning and nation-building. Through her research, she contributes to critical conversations on education reform, economic/gender justice, and reparatory justice in postcolonial contexts.
Corey Winchester (he/him) is a Chicago-based, Philly-born educator with nearly two decades of experience serving in various roles as a veteran classroom teacher, professional developer, coach, mentor, and coordinator. Corey has worked for several local, state and national organizations such as Breakthrough Collaborative, Evanston Township High School, the Golden Apple Foundation, the Aspen Young Leaders Fellowship, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Corey is the founder and lead consultant of House of Winchester Learning Designs, an organization committed to supporting the design, implementation, and cultivation of humanizing learning environments. In addition to being recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus from Loyola University Chicago's School of Education in 2016, he received the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019, was selected as Illinois History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in 2020, and received a resolution honoring his work as a community leader from the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 2024. Corey is a PhD Candidate in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University (NU) and has dual appointments as an adjunct instructor at NU’s School of Education and Social Policy and Saint Louis University's School of Education. Corey enjoys spending time with his partner, family, friends, and chosen family, traveling, tending to his plant babies, cooking and eating, reading, gaming, and occasionally binging on TV shows.
Vandana Sharma is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is a recipient of the UCEA Barbara Jackson Scholarship (2024-2026), a Duke Feminist Theory Workshop Travel Grant (2026), the 2025 Margaret & Paul Bacon Scholarship, the 2025 Dean’s Student Research Award, and the 2024 Taher & Myra Razik International Fellowship from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. In addition to her doctoral studies, she serves as a Graduate Student Ambassador for the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo. Vandana holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Delhi, India; a Bachelor of Education from GGSIP University, Delhi, India; a Master of Education from MDU University, Rohtak, India; and a Master of Education in Social Justice from Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada. She moved to Canada in 2017 to pursue her Master’s degree and is originally from Delhi, India.
Yilin Wang (she/her) is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology program at Boston College and an Early Childhood Policy Leadership Fellow. She is the recipient of the 2025–2026 Early Childhood Policy in Institutions of Higher Education (ECPIHE) Scholars’ Award. As the first person in her family to attend college and study abroad, Yilin understands the challenges of navigating academic institutions where expectations and pathways are often less visible to students without prior family experience in these settings. At the same time, through her own educational journey and her work with children and families in rural Southwest China, rural Nepal, and public housing communities in Boston, she has witnessed how family resilience and community support help young people navigate unfamiliar systems and spaces. These experiences shape Yilin’s research, which examines how inequities across ecological contexts influence early childhood development, how parents draw on their strengths to respond, and how early childhood policies can better support children and families facing structural disadvantage.
Beyond her research, Yilin is committed to connecting scholarship with policy and practice. She serves as the student representative for the Boston College Center for Child and Family Policy, where she works to demystify policy career pathways and support junior scholars interested in entering the field. She is also a leader of the Massachusetts Early Childhood Policy Research Collaborative, where she helps translate academic research into accessible insights and creates spaces for collaboration among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.
Yilin is on track to graduate in May 2027 and is currently pursuing tenure-track faculty positions at research-intensive universities. Her long-term goal is to translate developmental research into early childhood policies and practices that address structural disadvantage while leveraging family strengths to support children’s development, and to mentor the next generation of scholars advancing equity-focused research in applied developmental science.
Isaac A. Félix (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a learning scientist whose research centers on learning, culture, and education across the México–U.S. border, with a particular focus on the Tijuana–San Diego region. Anchored in cultural-historical approaches to learning and human development, Isaac’s dissertation employs qualitative methods to empirically examine the expansive forms of learning that unfold through the everyday movements of transfronterizx high school youth—U.S. citizens who live in Mexican border cities and cross the border daily to attend school in the United States—as they navigate the educational, sociopolitical, and cultural ecologies that shape their cross-border lives across the Tijuana–San Diego region.
Isaac earned a bachelor’s degree in Human Biology and Society and Chicana/o Studies from UCLA, and a Master of Arts in Education from UC Berkeley. He is the recipient of the 2025–2026 AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship and previously received the 2022 Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Isaac's work has been published in TESOL Quarterly, and he is also the recipient of the J. Michael Parker Award from the Literacy Research Association for his forthcoming study on transfronterizx commuters’ border-crossing learning and digital literacy practices across online platform ecologies.
Tasneem Sultana is a Doctoral Candidate in the Program of Higher Education Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Trained in education policy and economics, Tasneem’s research focuses on the preconditions, design, and outcome measures for policies that can inform policies to improve students’ life opportunities. Tasneem has experienced the education system in her home country, Bangladesh, and graduate-level education in the UK and the US. Before coming to the US for her doctoral studies, Tasneem got the opportunity to serve as an undergraduate economics instructor at a university in Bangladesh. Her lived experience of navigating various educational systems and transitions between contexts and roles informs her research perspective. Through her research, she seeks to contribute to policy designs in ways that acknowledge the various student contexts and heterogeneous needs, and policy pipelines that reinforce the gains from one another.
Dong Chen (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Higher Education Program at the University of Arizona, where she also earned an M.S. in Data Science and a Certificate in Computational Social Science. She holds an additional M.S. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Her research examines how higher education institutions navigate changing global, political, and market environments. She studies how federal and institutional policies shape universities’ global engagement and international collaboration, including international marketing, transnational scientific collaboration, and dual-degree partnerships. She uses qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods in this work. Chen has presented at national and international conferences, published in peer-reviewed journals including Higher Education Quarterly and the Journal of Career Development, and contributed a book chapter to Higher Education and Migration Pathways: Strengthening the Workforce and the Economy (Palgrave Macmillan).
Marissa Castillo is a first-generation college student from California and the proud daughter of immigrant parents. She is a dedicated Ph.D. student pursuing her studies in Educational Administration and Human Resource Development, focusing on Higher Education Administration at Texas A&M University. Her research is centered around the pivotal roles of Hispanic Serving Institutions within the educational landscape. Marissa brings a wealth of academic achievement to her pursuits, holding a Master of Science in Educational Administration with an emphasis in Higher Education, earned from Texas A&M University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology with a Minor in Sociology from the University of California, Merced.
With a robust background in education, Marissa has accumulated significant professional experience spanning various domains. She has dedicated three years to college access advising, followed by five years of invaluable service in undergraduate admissions and recruitment. Her dedication to service is evident through her leadership roles as President of the Graduate Representative Advisory Board and the Graduate Student Advisory Council, as well as her involvement with the New Professional and Graduate Student Review Board for the Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education.