Bio for Josefina Bañales

Bio for Kyle Davison

Marcy Higashi is the copyright, production, and administrative manager for the Institute for Learning. Her focus for this position is on eliminating and reducing obstacles in project development, and implementing efficient problem-solving and cost-cutting strategies in print and web media production.

She holds a BA in Animation from Loyola Marymount University and has over 20 years of experience in independent media production, publishing in nontraditional/diversity-focused media venues, and implementing and maintaining low-cost digital content distribution platforms. Higashi has had the privilege to work with educational and nonprofit organizations like the YWCA of Pittsburgh.

Jennifer Iriti conducts evaluations of education programs and organizations in PK-20 settings and leads large-scale educational improvement efforts focused on equity. Most recently, she has focused on programs that support postsecondary access and success, such as evaluation of the Pittsburgh Promise and in her role as Co-PI for an NSF INCLUDES Alliance intended to broaden participation in undergraduate STEM programs across the country. Her publications include articles in the American Journal of Evaluation, Educational Technology Research and Development, Education Finance and Policy and the International Journal of Educational Development as well as two book chapters and many technical reports. She holds a doctoral degree in Developmental and Educational Psychology and a certificate in Interdisciplinary Policy and Evaluation from the University of Pittsburgh. Jennifer also holds appointments to the graduate faculty and is a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Urban Education. She was an invited Scholar to the White House Domestic Policy Council’s convening on postsecondary access in 2016 based on her work around place-based scholarship programs. Finally, she is serving her second 4-year term as an elected public school board member for South Fayette Township School District and sits on the Comprehensive Guidance Plan committees for the Pittsburgh Public Schools and South Fayette Township School District. In her role as a South Fayette School Director she has nurtured significant work around diversity, equity and inclusion through policy changes, personnel, and curriculum reviews.

Bio for Shari Kubitz

Bio for Taylor Montue

Most of my research seeks to understand social psychological problems in two topical areas: politics and education. I am especially interested in issues such as educational achievement, partisanship, and organizational engagement, and I explore how people's behavior in these domains is shaped, in part, by their subjective understandings of themselves and their social environment. My research aims to understand social behavior with an eye toward strategies to change behavior in socially constructive ways.

Zachary Caddick is a graduate working with Dr. Ben Rottman in the Causal Learning & Decision Making Lab. His primary research focus relates to how beliefs and motivation affect reasoning and decision-making. Of particular interest is examining how effectively individuals make causal inferences when strong prior beliefs and preferences are present. The ultimate goal of his research is to improve our understanding of and ability to make quality decisions, especially when biases are likely to play a role in decision-making.

Sharon is a 5^th year doctoral student in Learning Sciences and Policy. She is interested in identity development and how non-familial adults can support that development, especially in informal learning contexts. Sharon was awarded a Student Faculty Research Grant from the School of Education to study identity development and authenticity in LGBTQIA+ undergraduates. She has been developing a qualitative research tool to help explore the complexities of identity in context. Before coming to Pitt, Sharon was a children’s librarian.

Broadly, I am interested in how individuals process information about the world via their group memberships and social identities, and how these processes in turn relate and contribute to systemic inequities in education and politics. Additionally, I am interested in the use of applied research to improve societal problems and to further inform social psychological theory for subsequent applied research.

Dani Hunter is a first year PhD student in the Developmental Psychology program with Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal. Broadly, Dani is interested in exploring resilience factors of marginalized groups including aspects of self-regulation, child-parent relationships and the impacts of economic disparities on child wellbeing. Past work involved studies related to health disparities, substance use, and ADHD. Additional experience includes clinical work in research, outpatient programs and integrative therapy via school based care.

Bio for Elizabeth Vortruba-Drzal

Patricia Albacete is a researcher at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds a BS in Physics and Computer Science and a MS and PhD in Intelligent Systems. Her research began under the guidance of Dr. Kurt VanLehn and has focused on the development and evaluation of intelligent tutoring systems particularly in the area of conceptual physics instruction and medicine. She is interested in studying the particular features of human tutoring that explain their effectiveness and in implementing these features in natural-language tutoring systems. Patricia has been co-principal investigator in several research projects that have expanded the boundaries of adaptive tutorial dialogue systems and has co-authored numerous academic articles.

She grew up in Argentina and soon after finishing her undergraduate studies moved to the USA to further her education. This has given her a keen awareness of the experience and difficulties students from different cultures and ethnicities face when pursuing higher education and when trying to establish themselves professionally in the U.S. Using this knowledge, she is eager to help foster a culture of inclusiveness and equity at the University of Pittsburgh through her work in the LRDC diversity committee.

Rosa E. Apodaca (Rosita) is the executive director of the Institute for Learning (IFL). Appointed to the role in 2017, Apodaca is responsible for the organization’s strategy, its development and integration of the diversity strategy for hiring and developing diverse talent, fostering an inclusive work environment, and ensuring management and fiscal accountability. Since assuming the role, Apodaca has established a framework of policy and practices that have advanced the IFL’s recognition as a leader in developing high-quality educational solutions in partnership with school districts, state departments, and universities.

In 2020 during the pandemic, Apodaca and the IFL team successfully moved the IFL’s on-the-ground services to online professional development, resources, programs, and digital products to serve its partner members in the United States and beyond.

Apodaca joined the IFL in 2000. Her previous roles there have been as a senior leadership fellow and an ELA fellow for Emergent Multilingual learners. Before joining the IFL, Apodaca held senior leadership positions in several large urban districts in Texas, New Jersey, and California. Apodaca has designed, developed, and led research-based educational programs that led to increased gains in learning and achievement for underserved students. She has published articles on leadership, instruction, and Emergent Multilingual Learner education. Apodaca served as chair, National Advisory and Coordinating Council on Bilingual Education, USOE, Washington, DC. She has spoken at international forums in Israel, Mexico, and Peru.

Apodaca holds an MA in Spanish literature and English as a second language from the University of Texas at El Paso and an MA and an EdD in educational leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is literate and fluent in English and Spanish and tweets @Mita11Rosita.

As an applied psychologist, Juan Del Toro examines the mechanisms through which interpersonal and institutional forms of racial discrimination shape inequities across the life span from childhood to young adulthood. I received my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a concentration in Advanced Quantitative Analyses at New York University. Specifically, Juan examines how specific perpetrators of racial discrimination (e.g., peers, school adults, and law enforcement) shape children’s life course trajectories. The goal of specifying perpetrators is to inform setting-specific policies and interventions working to improve the well-being of all youth. More recently, Juan has been integrating social survey and biological approaches to understand the interplay between discrimination and children’s biological systems. Juan’s dissertation was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University, and his first-author publications have appeared in a mix of disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, including Child Development and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Currently, Juan is a consulting editor for the Journal of Research on Adolescence (JRA) and will also serve in the incoming editorial board for Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology (CDEMP).

Kristin Klingensmith is a mathematics fellow at the Institute for Learning who works directly with teachers, instructional coaching, and building and district leaders to enhance and improve K-8 mathematics instruction. Since her time as a classroom teacher, she has been committed to creating space for students to connect their lived experiences in the world to their instructional experiences. An avid believer in the intersection of mathematics and literacy, Klingensmith strives to find ways to integrate opportunities for reading, writing, speaking, and listening into conceptual mathematics instruction. This integration is clearly evidenced in the SOAR and COVE instructional materials and the Math Planning Essential (MPE) guides which she developed in collaboration with others on the math team. Klingensmith serves as the digital newsletter Editor of Bridges to Learning.

I study authentic familial practices that support preschool children’s early language, literacy and math development in ethnically diverse communities and use that information to design, implement, and evaluate intervention programs for families in these communities. My research has identified two rarely studied familial practices that promote school readiness and are meaningful and culturally relevant for families from diverse ethnic backgrounds: food routines (e.g., grocery shopping, cooking, mealtimes) and oral narratives (e.g., reminiscing).

Jennifer Lin Russell is an associate professor of Learning Sciences and Policy in the School of Education and a research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) at the University of Pittsburgh. She is also a fellow with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Her research examines policy and other educational improvement initiatives through an organizational perspective, and seeks to reshape the relationship between educational research and practice in order to accelerate improvement in the field. Her recent work examines two primary issues: (1) how schools create social and organizational structures that support reform; and (2) how inter-organizational collaborations can be structured for educational improvement. In the first strand she examines how teachers’ social networks influence their implementation of ambitious mathematics teaching practices, as well as how secondary schools organize to support the inclusion of students with special needs. Her second strand of research examines how organizations can productively collaborate to pursue educational improvement. Since 2014, she has worked with the Tennessee Department of Education, the Institute for Learning and a team of researchers at LRDC to test and refine a model for instructional coaching that can support mathematics teaching improvement throughout the state of Tennessee. Additionally, she is examining how networked improvement communities launch and develop to support efforts to address complex practical problems. For example she is tracking the development of the Tennessee Early Literacy Network and the Better Math Teaching Network. Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. Prior to pursuing a research career, Russell was a special education teacher in Oakland, CA and Williamson County, TN.

Pete Compitello is the Gates Network for School Improvement (NSI) Research Project Manager for the Institute for Learning (IFL). Before teaming up with the IFL to improve equitable education in public schools across the country, he taught high school English in New York City public schools for almost a decade, managed editorial development and print production for publishers around the world, and led people to new heights in outdoor education and adventures in as many of these United States as his feet could carry him.

With a bachelor's degree in World Literature and a master's degree in English from North Carolina State University, a master's degree in Secondary Education from CUNY Hunter college, a certificate in Teaching Students with Disabilities from CUNY Brooklyn college, and a history of helping students with disabilities, people of color, and low-income and other marginalized groups become college and career ready, Compitello is looking forward to using his background in equitable education to support the IFL as a Gates NSI hub for the Dallas Independent School District and other districts nationwide.

Compitello believes education is a lifelong playing-to-learn and learning-to-play experience, so when he's not helping teachers teach teachers to better teach students, he plays with his wife Kirsten, son James, and daughter Elise.

My lab investigates human learning, problem solving, and motivation with an aim to understand, predict, and promote knowledge transfer. Transfer is the ability to use prior knowledge and experience to solve novel problems. We have focused on four interrelated lines of research: 1) investigating the cognitive and metacognitive processes underlying transfer success and failure, 2) exploring the relations between motivation, learning, and transfer, 3) examining the social and ecological processes that support or inhibit transfer, and 4) investigating the effects of mindfulness meditation on emotion regulation, learning, and transfer.

A life-long advocate of antiracism and antiracist leadership while working diligently and passionately for children who have been marginalized and poorly educated because of race, poverty, geographical location, or any imposed condition is the work of Dr. Glenn Nolly. His education career spans 35 years in the Austin Independent School District in Austin, Texas, where he served as teacher, principal, area superintendent, associate superintendent, and director of professional development. One of the many significant accomplishments of his career is successfully retooling an underperforming high school to build an Advanced Placement program that mirrored the population of the school. His knowledge of developing and supporting communities of practice transformed a group of high school principals into a functional professional learning community. Other areas of expertise include development and evaluation of effective leadership practices, processes and programs.

In addition to being a senior fellow at the IFL, Nolly is an assistant professor of practice at The University of Texas at Austin in the College of Education. Prior to joining the IFL as a fellow, Nolly was a consultant working for the IFL on several projects in various districts across the country including Austin, Texas.

Nolly earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of North Texas, a Master of Education from Texas State University, and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interest includes the marginalization of African-American students and their overrepresentation in suspensions and special education.

My central research interest is in the cognitive science of reading and language processes. The research spans lower and higher level processes and the nature of reading ability and second language processes. My approach involves multiple research methods in behavioral, ERP and fMRI labs. The general goal is to achieve a richer view of language processes by the combination of methods.

Bio for Erin Walker

Bio for Ming-Te Wang