Camillia Matuk

Camillia Matuk is Associate Professor and program director of NYU Steinhardt's Educational Communication and Technology program, and director of RIDDLE. She serves on the editorial boards of  the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Instructional Science, and the International Journal for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (ijCSCL). She is a member of the Education Committee for the International Society for the Learning Sciences, and co-chair of the 2027 Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science and Education.

Camillia's research explores how socially-driven inquiry learning experiences can expand the ways that learners engage with and understand the world, and empower them to address issues that matter to them. She is especially interested in how these learning experiences can be enriched with technology, storytelling, and the arts, and in how they can be made achievable in both informal contexts, and formal ones, including middle school, high school, university.

Camillia's current projects explore how technologies for data storytelling and creative visualization—and carefully designed artificial intelligence (AI) guidance—can promote critical research and data literacies, in the context of learner-driven inquiry. She uses mixed methods that draw on design-based research (DBR) and design-based implementation research (DBIR), and that include co-designing with practitioners, pre/post assessments, quasi-experiments, participant interviews, learner-generated artifact analyses, and qualitative description.

Camillia's earlier research involved designing and studying the impacts of classroom-based, online technologies on middle school students' science inquiry learning; designing teacher professional development; and investigating people's sense-making of narrative-based scientific representations (e.g., comics, animations, diagrams).

Camillia's projects are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Health (NIH), and have been presented at conferences of the International Society for the Learning Sciences (ICLS), the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Educational Research (AERA), and at other conferences in psychology, visualization, games, and the cognitive sciences. Her work has been recognized with a 2013 Outstanding Research Presentation Award from the AERA Design & Technology SIG; a 2015 Best Design Paper Award, and a 2019 Best Paper nomination, both from the International Conference for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL).

From 2008-2010, Camillia held an SSHRC doctoral fellowship and a Cognitive Science Graduate Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Research Projects. She was a DR-K12 CADRE Fellow from 2010-2011. Prior to joining NYU, was a postdoc with Marcia Linn on the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE), and lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she taught graduate-level courses on Scientific Thinking and Learning, and Integrating Technology into Secondary English Instruction for PhD and masters and teaching credential students.

Camillia has a PhD in the Learning Sciences from Northwestern University. Previously, she was a medical illustrator at INVIVO (now Red Nucleus) in Toronto. She holds an MSc in Biomedical Communications from the University of Toronto, an OCGC in 3D Computer Animation from Sheridan College, a BSc in Biological Sciences from the University of Windsor, and an ARCT in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music.