Dr. Jacqueline Cavazos

Jacqueline received her B.A in Psychology from California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) in 2016. During her time at CSUF, she participated in the NIH-funded Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC) program where she explored the effects of race and disguise on human face perception. After completing her time as a MARC scholar, she later returned as a MARC alumni mentor where she remains a mentor to current MARC scholars. In 2020, Jacqueline completed her PhD in Psychological Sciences from the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). While at UTD, her research focused on examining how race impacts face identification in humans and state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms. In addition, she explored potential ways to mitigate the errors caused by race performance variations. These strategies included multi-image learning, learning context, presentation order, and collaborative face identification decisions. Jacqueline’s dissertation entitled, “Does Race Matter?: Testing Parameters for Collaboration Benefits on Face Identification Accuracy” received the Honorable Mention of the Best Dissertation Award for the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UTD. 

More recently, Jacqueline completed a two-year postdoctoral scholar position at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in the School of Education. Jacqueline was appointed this postdoctoral position through the Gates Foundation Learning Engineering Postdoctoral Fellows Program. Her work focused on using natural language processing to explore the sociocognitive processes that occur during collaborative problem solving in diverse teams. More specifically, she explored the role of communication in diverse groups as a potential to address central questions surrounding inclusion in collaborative interactions and its benefit for STEM education and workforce environments. Jacqueline has used language to explore team communication dynamics to demonstrate that diversity across factors such as cultural, racial/ethnic, minority/majority status play an important role in how individuals communicate in collaborative interactions. While at UCI, she also participated as a scholar in the Learning Analytics in STEM Education Research (LASER) Institute and was a Co-Chair for the 12thInternational Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Conference. In addition to supporting and mentoring MARC scholars, Jacqueline’s outreach and mentorship work includes her participation in workshops focused on inclusion at the Learning @ Scale 2022, and invitations to speak as a guest scientist to undergraduate students at CSUF and the University of San Diego. As part of the organizing committee for LAK22, she also assisted in the development of two new professional development workshops aimed at providing new opportunities for members to discuss learning analytic topics. Jacqueline has presented her work at local, national, and international venues such annual meetings for the Vision Sciences Society, the International Face Performance Conference, International Summer School for Advanced Studies on Biometrics for Secure Authentication, and International Educational Data Mining Society. In addition, her research has been published in various journal outlets such as: Vision Research, IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science, British Journal of Psychology, and Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. Her current research focuses on collaborative team interactions, racial/ethnic diversity in decision making, promoting inclusion in STEM fields, and natural language processing.