Tell us about where you are from and what your childhood was like.

I grew up in Rhode Island – first in North Providence (until I was 10) and then in Burrillville. My childhood was organized around family, sports, and academics. Me and my younger sister Elise spent a lot of time with my grandpa John (my other grandparents passed when I was little) and my aunts and uncles on my dad’s side of the family. We both played soccer all through childhood, mostly in and for a town in which I never lived but where a lot of my family lived close by (Smithfield, RI). I also was pretty serious about school, especially math, participating in Math League all four years of high school.

When did you first learn about engineering? What about it interested you the most?

During my freshman year of high school, there was an elective available called Engineering Design that I took. I don’t remember why I selected it, but it quickly became an obsession of mine – I would stay after school before soccer practice and work on CAD models in SolidWorks. I think the thing that interested me the most was the creativity, and especially the ability to create something artistic feeling using geometry, which was much more intuitive to me than painting, sculpting, and other expressive arts.

Why did you choose to study engineering education?

After undergrad, I moved to Seattle with two close friends. I had just gotten a degree in Mechanical Engineering (from Tufts) and was planning to do something related to product design. But the job market was rough–I got close on two jobs, but one seemed interminably boring and wanted a long-term (5+ year) commitment, and the other I ended up losing to someone who had more job experience (all entry-level jobs wanted 2+ years of experience because that makes sense). In the meantime, I took up tutoring to make money to live, and through that, I ended up connecting with my first real job out of school, working for a CS education start-up called TechSmartKids. I really enjoyed my time there, but it was a lot of work, I had few friends in the area, and I was looking for a good reason to move back to the Boston area where many of my friends (and family) were still situated. Plus, I knew next to nothing about education from an academic perspective, so I applied for the MS in STEM education at Tufts (which I chose largely because of prior work with the CEEO during my undergrad).

Tell us about your research. 

My dissertation research regarded student agency in carrying out lab science investigations. We were designing an intro bio lab course (that my advisor, Julia Gouvea, ran) to position students with more opportunities to shape their own investigations; I looked into when, why, and how they took up those opportunities. I am generally very interested in supporting students’ self-driven work, and in understanding the micro-level dynamics of how students pursue STEM learning tasks.

In my postdoctoral position, I have begun to work on new areas of research pertaining to the projects I’m helping with. For my work in the Navajo Nation, I am trying to structure culturally relevant engineering education research in a way that accounts for issues of data sovereignty and local participation. For my work with the Inclusive Computational Thinking project, I am learning about autism, executive functioning, and how to responsibly conduct research that can support the development of individualized education resources. Across all these different projects, my intention is to amplify student success by examining what works for students and showing off what they can accomplish.

Why did you choose to study this? 

My dissertation research flowed in part from the education setting I found myself in and in part because I found descriptive work more interesting and meaningful in actual learning contexts than evaluative or prescriptive research. It feels maybe trite to write out, but I genuinely feel we need to value learning as an individual and social growth process–for the people learning–rather than an early career pathway. This means embracing complexity in how learning happens, heterogeneity across students in a classroom, and individualized trajectories of learning. One thing that’s exciting for me from this perspective is that there is effectively infinite nuance to explore and understanding to discover. Both of my research avenues in my postdoctoral studies highlight different dimensions of this nuance – social–cultural–and political elements of culturally relevant engineering education, and individualized elements of IEP education. And even more so in both these cases, direct impact factors in, which I want front and center in any work I do.

What do you like about Tufts?  

The community, mostly. I’ve been at this institution for 13 years–the vast majority of my adult life–and I’ve found so many welcoming, kind, and energizing communities. I love that so many of my undergraduate friends have stayed in the area, forming a life-long friend group, and I’m excited to have expanded that group with many wonderful people in my graduate studies. This extends to my work experience–I could not have asked for a more thoughtful, caring advisor than Julia, except now I have an equally wonderful mentor in Merredith.

What do you want to do next?

As for what’s long-term, I really want to continue doing work that has a direct impact on teachers and students. I really appreciate the outreach mentality of the CEEO in this regard, and I would love to work for this or another like-minded organization, developing (freely accessible) resources while continuing to spotlight students’ ingenuity in learning.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I spend a lot of my free time being a homebody. I cook, clean, and try to improve my space bit by bit. Outside of that, I really enjoy board games and outdoor activities. I try to be part of some sort of game once a week if I can, and I will find time to at least walk daily, and ideally to bike or hike with some regularity. I also love to make things–prior to the pandemic, I would find time to work on little design projects making a planter or game box or something. I’m hoping to spin up some similar projects in the near future. OH, and in the last few years, I’ve gotten more into photography – I mostly take pictures on trips, but I also like to find opportunities to photograph birds, flowers, or landscapes around where I live. Most recently I helped to video record my sister’s wedding!