Graduate Student

Vianney A. Gavilanes

Vianney A. Gavilanes is a doctoral candidate in the Critical Studies of Race, Class and Gender. As a self-identified Mexican migrant child educated in California’s public K-12 schools and universities, she is committed to serving racially and linguistically minoritized students like herself for whom English has been a site of linguistic violence and political struggle.

As an interdisciplinary scholar of education, Vianney draws on (im)migration, critical refugee studies and language politics to engage in theoretically robust research that disrupts the objectifying study...

Julissa Navas

Julissa is a third year PhD student in the School Psychology program at UC Berkeley. She was born and raised in Southern California to two hard-working immigrant parents from Mexico and El Salvador. Julissa, a first generation college student, completed her undergraduate studies at UC Irvine and graduated with honors with a BA in Psychology and Education Sciences.

Her graduate research currently focuses on examining the relationship between teacher expectations, teacher practices, and students’ academic achievement. She is also interested in exploring how school and classroom...

Meg Escudé

Meg Escudé is a phd student in the Learning Sciences and Human Development cluster. Her research engages community-based afterschool educators in the co-development of liberatory learning experiences for young people. Meg has over 12 years of experience as an educator and program director in which she worked to create out-of-school learning environments that honor the diverse ways in which non-dominant children and youth express their brilliance, particularly in work that intersects STEM, cultural practice, and art.

Specializations and Interests

Participatory...

Ratih Ayu Apsari

Ratih is a first-year PhD student in the cluster of Learning Science and Human Development (LSHD) and is interested in embodied cognition, design-based research, ethnomathematics, cultural funds of knowledge, and cross-cultural epistemic diversity.

She obtained her BA from Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha (Bali, Indonesia), MSc from Utrecht University (Utrecht, The Netherlands) & Universitas Sriwijaya (Palembang, Indonesia), and MA from Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha (Bali, Indonesia). Prior to her attendance as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, she taught for five years as a...

Amelia Farid

Milly's research explores how student engagement in mathematical disciplinary practices can be leveraged towards advancing conceptual understanding of mathematics content. With a BA and MA in mathematics, Milly is interested in bringing powerful mathematics to all students. She has experience teaching math at the middle school and undergraduate levels, as well as initiating and working in grassroots youth empowerment programs all over the world (China; Colombia; New York; and California).

Specializations and Interests

Mathematics Education; Cognition...

Andrew Phuong

Andrew Estrada Phuong is a Chancellor’s Fellow, consultant, and program developer. He has a master's degree from Harvard University and has conducted mixed-methods experimental research. Phuong has studied how adaptive equity-oriented pedagogies and instructor professional development strategies reduce stereotype threat and enhance students’ academic achievement, growth mindsets, and psychosocial outcomes (e.g., motivation, self-efficacy, sense of belonging, inclusion).

Phuong also uses human-centered design and hierarchical and longitudinal regression modeling to examine how equity...

Sarah Manchanda

Sarah Manchanda is pursuing a PhD in School Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her lived experiences as a disabled woman of color shape her research interests, clinical work, and advocacy efforts in graduate school. Sarah is driven by a firm commitment to promote inclusive learning for all students. She believes that meaningful inclusion encompasses social and emotional wellbeing, and this is her primary area of focus. Her current research interests include (a) Peer victimization based on disability and race; (b) Promoting the capacity of teachers and peer bystanders...

Zoe Silverman

Zoe Silverman is a doctoral student in Learning Sciences & Human Development at UC Berkeley. She is interested in object-based teaching and learning, embodied cognition, sensory studies, inquiry and interpretation in the arts, museum historiography, and joint attention. Her current project engages ethnographic methods and interaction analysis to explore the epistemic ideologies of emerging museum educators at a university art museum.

Zoe worked for more than a decade as an education specialist and program coordinator at a variety of arts and cultural institutions, including the...

Talia Leibovitz

Talia Leibovitz (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in School Psychology in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores how white parents’ school choices for their children are informed and shaped by policy; notions of merit; colorblindness; neoliberalism; racism; and the social construction of race, focusing especially on the ways in which white parents construct, contest and reinforce school quality through dialogue and behavior. Talia is motivated by the following questions: How does school choice among white parents take...

Julien Putz

Julien Putz is a first-year doctoral student in the Graduate Group of Science and Mathematics Education (SESAME) at UC Berkeley. His primary advisor is Prof. Dor Abrahamson and he is an active member of the Embodied Design Research Laboratory. He is interested in understanding and modelling the cognitive processes that constitute mathematical thinking from an embodied and enactive perspective. Further interests of his include the relationships between physical skill acquisition and conceptual learning in mathematics. He also seeks to leverage first-person methodologies like...