Sonia Alves is a fifth year doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a concentration in human development and education. Her research interest includes understanding the longitudinal association between community violence exposure and youth academic outcomes. Sonia is interested in identifying mechanisms that link community violence exposure to academic functioning, with a focus on emotion dysregulation and inattention as potential mechanisms and understanding the ways in which the school context, such as school climate and connectedness, can buffer the negative consequences of community violence exposure on academic functioning. And additionally, she is curious about learning how developing coping skills and strategies for managing stressful experiences can influence positive developmental outcomes and academic success in youth.
Americo Amorim is interested in how instructional content such as apps and games can be developed and deployed to facilitate teachers’ work and enhance student learning and motivation. He is a currently an EdD candidate at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation work involves the development and evaluation of a program designed to scaffold four and five-year-old students’ phonological awareness, word reading and writing skills. His mixed method study consists of a randomized controlled trial involving 740 students in 62 classrooms of 17 schools located in five cities of Brazil. Americo started to develop interactive content when he was 15 years-old. During his undergraduate studies, his research received prestigious awards and media attention. As an educator, he specializes in research and development of digital media for learning and is the recipient of several grants and contracts for his projects.
Maria Arredondo received her PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan under the supervision of Drs. Ioulia Kovelman and Susan Gelman and is currently a postdoc at the University of British Columbia working with Dr. Janet Werker. She is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist interested in bilingual infants and young children’s language acquisition and cognitive development. Her research investigates the cognitive mechanisms that allow children to acquire multiple languages, how bilingualism impacts the brain, and how children use language(s) to learn and understand their culture(s). Through these mechanisms, she explores what allows diverse and multilingual children to learn their languages successfully and provide them with the skills to succeed academically. Maria’s research spans from infancy across childhood, and it focuses on Latino and Asian children from immigrant families who often learn a minority language at home and English at school.
Alexandra G. Aylward is an advanced doctoral candidate in sociology of education within the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities at NYU Steinhardt. She is interested in understanding how neighborhood contextual factors affect educational outcomes in addition to the school environment by conducting quasi-experimental studies to better understand social inequality generally. Her dissertation research investigates how the uniquely American system of mass incarceration interacts with the school context to exacerbate and maintain educational inequalities. There are likely to be significant spillover effects from mass incarceration, and one of the most under examined is how incarceration impacts youth development and educational outcomes in high-incarceration areas. Alexandra’s research specifically addresses how concentrated incarceration in areas of California influences the academic achievement of children and the school climate, including teachers’ expectations of students and students’ aspirations within these communities.
Donte Bernard is a fifth year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology Program. He earned his BA in psychology from Kansas State University and his MA in psychology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Donte’s research interests investigate the unique race-related factors that may influence the development of the impostor phenomenon—feelings of intellectual incompetence—among racial minority youth and emerging adults. Additionally, he is also interested in identifying risk and protective factors that may influence the positive psychological development of ethnic and racial minority in the context of racial injustice. His dissertation project will quantitatively and qualitatively examine the construct validity of impostor phenomenon among Black students. His previous research has explored the association between racial identity, racial discrimination, and the impostor phenomenon. In 2013, Donte was awarded a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.
Jalil Mustaffa Bishop is a PhD candidate in higher education and organizational change at University of California, Los Angeles in the school of education. His research focuses on the geography of education opportunity, student activism, and how ideologies of education opportunity mask Black people's oppression. Jalil documents the ways anti-Blackness interlocks with common-sense ideas around meritocracy and whiteness. More importantly, he examines how marginalized people engage in acts of refusal, disruption, and spatialization that expose and even move beyond limiting notions of race and meritocracy, with a focus on the power dynamics of space and place in educational spaces be it K-12 schools or college campuses. Overall, Jalil challenges the common-sense idea that systems of schooling are spaces of escape from oppressive realities when in fact they often reproduce and expand them.
Douglas Brunton is a doctoral degree candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. A critical/cultural scholar, his dissertation project - The Creole Web - A dasein for the digital - constructs the creole, rooted in the Latin creare; as the primary technological product of the global political economy of the Age of Empire created by language, collective memory and place – the Terra Incognita of the Americas. Presenting this identity as both lens and method; this project offers a new understanding of the personal and social constructions afforded by the New World of online spaces as people continue to negotiate the intricacies of time, place, and interpellations in such unmapped or unknown spaces. The interest in media, culture, and identity in global contexts; informs another related strand of research into digital surveillance. This work being mainly concerned with the role the interpretive constructs of identity are policed.
Andrene Jones Castro is a PhD student in the department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include the cultural political economy of teacher labor markets, policies and pathways in teacher education, and critical and culturally responsive practices in community-based education. In particular, her dissertation research examines polices related to teacher shortages and how school leaders’ enact these policies and negotiate various types of teacher shortages within local contexts. These interests reflect Andrene’s professional experiences as a former teacher and school leader in an urban high school. A recipient of the Archer Fellowship (2016), Andrene served as a policy intern at The White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans at The United States Department of Education. She is also a recipient of theBarbara L. Jackson and David L. Clark Scholar programs.
Chia-Yang Chiang is a post-professional doctoral student in occupational therapy, is a graduate of National Taiwan University and New York University, and is has been practicing occupational therapy in a variety of settings, including hospitals, community day programs, and schools. His research interests focus on students with moderate to severe intellectual and developmental disabilities. In particular, Chia-Yang is concerned with increasing student participation and transition from school to employment and community. His current areas of inquiry include the efficacy of the existing self-determination and vocational training programs for adolescents with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Jacqueline Cruz is a doctoral degree candidate in sociology of education at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She is primarily interested in gender inequality in higher education. Her research focuses on understanding how higher education administrators create and implement Title IX policies aimed at addressing and reducing campus sexual violence. Jackie holds a bachelor of arts in english from Wesleyan University and a Master of Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Elizer Jay de los Reyes was born and raised in a farming village in Northern Philippines and he was the first in his family to study abroad. He is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne in Australia. Drawing upon his rural and transnational biography, Jay’s interest focuses on imagination, futures, and mobilities. His thesis explores the ways in which young people in the villages of a farming town, in the Cordillera Mountains, Northern Philippines, are imagining and forging their futures in the context of banal transnational mobilities of labour, finance, and ideas. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign where he finished an MA in educational policy studies and he is currently a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst scholar at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, Germany (Winter 2017).
José R. Del Real Viramontes is a doctoral degree candidate in the Cultural Studies in Education Program at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds a master of arts in cultural studies in education from The University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor of arts in Chicana and Chicano studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. As a former community college transfer student, his research interests explore the transfer receptive culture for Chicana/o Latina/o community college transfer students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and how Chicana/o Latina/o community college transfer students navigate and engage in the cultural production of the transfer receptive culture at PWIs. His research addresses both the “transfer gap” from the community college to a four-year university and the completion of bachelor’s degrees, by students of color who begin their postsecondary education at the community college, with an emphasis on Chicana/o Latina/o students.
Eric Felix is a doctoral degree candidate in the Urban Education Policy program at the University of Southern California. He is a research assistant working with Dr. Estela M. Bensimon at the Center for Urban Education. His research examines the role higher education policy in addressing educational inequities for students of color, particularly within community college. He recently co-authored a book chapter titled “California’s Student Equity Policy: An Unexploited Opportunity among Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges” examining the ways state policy is implemented to address and improve equity issues for Latinx students. Other research interests include community college finance and improving the transfer process for racially-minoritized students.
René Espinoza Kissell is a Ph.D. candidate in education policy at the University of California Berkeley specializing in the political economy of urban education, community engagement in district reform, and the racial politics of educational privatization. Her dissertation examines the race and class politics of the ‘portfolio strategy’ in Oakland’s public schools, with a focus on how community stakeholders and policy elites navigate changing district governance through coalition building. A proud product of the Milwaukee Public Schools, René received her BA in Latin American studies and Spanish literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MA in education policy from UC Berkeley. Outside of graduate studies, she has worked in education through school-level support and community organizing.
Anindya Kundu is a doctoral degree candidate in sociology of education. Anindya studies the potential of human agency in helping students overcome obstacles and create positive change in their lives. His dissertation research adds social and cultural context to "grit" by learning how students can navigate around personal, social, and institutional challenges to succeed. Anindya's book Achieving Agency is forthcoming; and he is the 2017 recipient of the NYU Steinhardt Outstanding Doctoral Student Teaching Award. Anindya has taught undergraduate courses on race and inequality, such as American Dilemmas: Race, Inequality, and the Unfulfilled Promise of Public Education at NYU and often contributes to public discourse on education. His work has appeared in NPR Education, MSNBC and Huffington Post and his TED Talk will be available on September 25, 2017.
Keisha T. Lindsay is a third year doctoral student in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Howard University. A proud New York University alumna and the student speaker at the 2004 Commencement celebration. Keisha received her BS degree in speech-language pathology and audiology from the NYU Steinhardt. She received her master’s degree in speech-language pathology from the City University of New York – Queens College in 2006 and has practiced as a speech-language pathologist for the past 11 years. At Howard, Keisha’s research focus is in the area of child language. Specifically, her doctoral work is aimed at creating profiles of language development for children who speak Trinidadian English Creole. A daughter of the Trinidadian soil, Keisha’s general research interests are in sociolinguistics, psychometrics and the development of service learning initiatives in speech-language pathology throughout the Caribbean region.
Gilberto Lopez is a doctoral candidate in social and behavioral sciences at Harvard University. He holds master’s degrees in public health from Johns Hopkins University and in medical anthropology from Southern Methodist University. His interests include applying mixed-methods techniques to understanding the social determinants of health among (im)migrant populations. For his doctoral dissertation, he will analyze the relationship between social stressors and various health outcomes (i.e., smoking, drinking, and depression) in indigenous Mixteco Mexican immigrants.
Jeaná E. Morrison is a PhD candidate in the Educational Leadership and Learning Technologies program at the Drexel University School of Education. Her research interests focus on issues of access and equity in higher education with particular emphasis on the involvement of racial and ethnic minority students. Jeaná's dissertation examines the experiences of Black students attending Brazilian universities that utilize affirmative action in admissions. Jeaná is involved in various academic and social activities at the University and recently served as the president of the Drexel Black Graduate Student Union. She is also a member of a number of professional organizations where she attends conferences and presents research annually.
Walter P. Parrish III is a doctoral student in Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis with a minor in management & human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While pursuing his doctorate, Walter has held various roles as a research and teaching assistant, policy/program analyst, adviser, as well as a research associate at the American Council on Education in D.C. His research is centered on higher education workforce diversity, workplace and labors experiences, and organizational culture and behavior. His dissertation will examine the relationship between faculty workplace bullying and self-efficacy.Walter has presented at international and national colloquia, and he has published on Black doctoral student socialization, retention models for administrators of color in higher education, and African Americans in the scientific workforce. Prior to his doctoral studies, Walter was a student affairs administrator for seven years. He is originally from West Philadelphia, born and raised.
Nicole Perez is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently a doctoral degree candidate at the University of Notre Dame in the department of Sociology where she is affiliated with the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity. Nicole’s research interests include education, race and ethnicity, and immigration. Her dissertation investigates how 1.5/ 2 nd generation Latino adolescents are navigating the transition to postsecondary education and entry to the labor market within a new immigrant receiving context. The dramatic population growth and redistribution of the U.S. Latino population has disrupted the racial and ethnic landscape in new destination communities, and as a result, involves a number of individual and community level implications that warrants further study. Using qualitative methods, she unearths the tension between structural constraints, opportunity structures and agency encountered by Latino young adults as the first cohort of Latinos “coming of age” without a historic co-ethnic enclave.
Fernando Plascencia is a PhD regional science and a job market candidate at Cornell University. His research interests are focused on health economics, behavioral economics, and social networks. His current research lies in a multi-disciplinary approach incorporating tools from computational social science to study complex social interactions and behavioral responses to crises [i.e violence produced by urban warfare, terrorism]. Currently, techniques and insights from data science are used to applications to social good. His dissertation uses computational methods to explore experimental measures of subjective well-being in locations affected by violence, in addition, to measure risk perception and policy preferences. His work has been presented at the North American Regional Science Council (NARSC). You can find more information on his website.
Nicole Rangel is an educator and PhD candidate in the Social and Cultural Studies of Education program at University of California, Berkeley. Nicole's research has woven together theories of decolonization and play studies in order to generate holistic approaches to education. More currently, she is a David P. Gardner Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies of Higher Education and is working on her dissertation. This research explores how the "neoliberalization of the university," a concept central to critical university studies, affects how academic freedom is valued and practiced at two U.S. public ivy schools. Using a comparative case study approach, this work draws on various data sources including in-depth interviews with public intellectuals (as defined by Edward Said), and aims to elucidate ways of reinforcing the academy’s connection to, and responsibility for the public that it is tasked to serve.
Keri L. Rodgers earned her BA in Spanish from Cornell University and began her career as a New York City Teaching Fellow in the South Bronx. She is a doctoral teaching fellow and PhD candidate at Ball State University in educational studies, specializing in curriculum with cognates in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies (CEPS) and Educational Technology. She has been recognized for her teaching and leadership, receiving the 2017 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Keri’s research interests include the intersectionalities of curriculum theory and democratic education, disability studies and global education, educational equity and multicultural education, and humanistic uses of learning spaces and technology in teacher education. Her dissertation, Co-facilitation in the Preservice Teacher Classroom: A Mixed Methods Hermeneutical Inquiry, explores the impact of the co-facilitation model she has created and implemented for preservice teachers.
Rose G. Salseda is a Ford Fellow and a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests in the parallel and intersecting histories of black and brown peoples are directly informed by her upbringing in South Central Los Angeles. She specializes in the politics of race and the work of Chicanx, Latinx, and African American artists in the United States. Rose is completing her dissertation, The Visual Art Legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, which focuses on two generations of artists who have made work in response to the unrest and related episodes of racial violence. In addition, Rose is the associate director of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum, an advocacy organization dedicated to expanding and enhancing the visibility of Latinx art, and she is a core organizer for at land’s edge, a pedagogical platform for artists who are committed to social transformation.
Jarritt A. Sheel recently became a member of the music education faculty at NYU Steinhardt and is currently finishing his EdD in music education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research and scholarly interests focus on the topics of inclusion, social justice, critical race theory and the intersectionality of how these topics are explored and expressed in hip-hop and music education cohere. More specifically, Jarritt is interested in learning more about how hip-hop can open up new spaces in the world of music education and is focused on creating new music curriculum based on hip-hop frameworks and practices, incorporating hip-hop pedagogies into music teacher preparation programs, as well as performing music from the hip-hop genre within music education programs. Additionally, he aspires to start a popular music lab to help facilitate the develop of more culturally relevant processes and practices in music education. Last, he is devoted to and loves working within the community to help create positive change.
Michael Singh is a doctoral degree candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He is enrolled in the Designated Emphasis program in Women, Gender, & Sexuality and a graduate fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. His work looks at the cultural production of the image of the Latino male mentor. His dissertation research is an ethnographic case study of an urban school district’s Latino male mentorship program and the way the program envisions the problems of Latino boys and the embodied solutions of Latino male mentors. His work brings an intersectional approach to the cultural politics of Latino male mentorship and explores the way the image of the male mentor is implicated in the distribution of educational resources as well as the reproduction of gender norms in schools. Michael was born and raised in Woodland, California near Sacramento.
Sulare Telford is a PhD candidate in communication sciences and disorders at Howard University. She is also an Ernest E. Just-Percy L. Julian Fellow. She holds a MS in communication sciences and disorders and bachelor’s degrees in spanish and speech-language pathology and audiology. Her research interests are in child language development, specifically focusing on psychometrics (test development) and sociolinguistics. Sulare’s dissertation study aims to (a) identify the grammatical, phonological and lexical features of Guyanese Creole and (b) investigate the appropriateness of two language assessments for evaluating the linguistic competencies of Guyanese children. Due to nature of her work, Sulare provides services to children with speech-language delays secondary to developmental disorders and syndromes in the clinic, school and early intervention settings. As a member of a Bilingual/Spanish assessment team she has experience providing culturally and linguistically appropriate services to a variety of populations.
Anthony Ureña is a PhD candidate in sociology at Columbia University. A Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow, Anthony’s research interests lie at the intersections of health inequality, race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, and risk. His work examines the social factors that contribute to the persistence of health inequalities within marginalized communities. His dissertation explores how racial identity, sexuality, and socioeconomic class impact the ways Black and/or Latino men who have sex with men perceive HIV/AIDS risk in their day-to-day lives. Anthony holds a BA in both sociology and human biology from Brown University. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, he volunteered at several HIV/AIDS NGOs in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to produce an ethnography detailing the persistence of the epidemic in the city’s metropolitan and slum neighborhoods. Anthony is a Brooklyn native with ethnic roots in the Dominican Republic.
Darsella Vigil is a PhD student in the Higher Education program at the University of Denver, where she currently works in the Office of Campus Life and Inclusive Excellence and teaches in the Graduate School of Social Work. Darsella earned her master’s degree in educational leadership, policy, and advocacy at New York University, where she worked for the Higher Education Opportunity Programs, providing academic support to historically underrepresented students. As a first-generation college student herself, Darsella’s research interests include examining issues of access, persistence, outcomes, and equity for first-generation, low-income, immigrant, and undocumented students of color. She employs mixed methodologies and utilizes critical theoretical frameworks to evaluate and inform higher educational policies directly impacting marginalized communities. Darsella was a recipient of the Channing Briggs Small Research grant through NASPA and was awarded Research Impact 2016 by DU’s College of Education Student Association for her work on institutionalizing support for undocumented students.
Ashleigh Greene Wade is a PhD candidate in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Situated within the fields of Black girlhood studies, media studies, and digital humanities, Ashleigh’s primary research seeks to understand technology practices among Black girls. She is particularly interested in how Black girls use cell-phone generated photography and film to contribute to cultural discourses on race, gender, and sexuality and how these visual expressions intersect with Black girls’ creation of and movement through space.
Devon Tyrone Wade is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. His research and teaching interests explore issues around race/ethnic inequality, crime & punishment and urban education. He is currently working on his dissertation examining how trauma and mental health issues are responded to in schools and its intersections with punitive and reactionary environments. The project seeks to interrogate core ideas about social mobility and schools, particularly for vulnerable youth. Devon is from Houston, Texas and is a graduate of Louisiana State University with degrees in sociology/criminology and African & African American Studies.
Xiang Zhou is a doctoral degree candidate for counseling psychology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is broadly interested in the intersection of culture and parenting. He engages in both basic science research (e.g., cultural socialization) as well as counseling intervention research. Currently, his work focuses on cultural adaptation of evidence-based parenting interventions for ethnic-racial families (i.e., Hmong American and Somali American families) through community-based participatory research.