Research 

My research explores how higher education can better recognize and support the full range of student capacities through three interconnected areas: Interdisciplinary, Internationalization, and Innovation. I began with program evaluation, examining how NSF-funded interdisciplinary initiatives impact student learning, career readiness, and innovation capacities in STEM. This work sharpened my skills in study design and data analysis while raising deeper questions about what counts as “learning” or “success,” and who is recognized, or overlooked, by our assessment tools. 

In response, I apply both critical and psychometric lenses to interrogate how higher education constructs international students, validate measures of innovation capacities for graduate and international populations, and identify the environmental conditions that foster equitable student growth. Through those works, I aim to advance equity-centered measurement and provide institutions with tools that capture and support the diverse contributions of all students.

Interdisciplinary 

Collaboration across disciplines is inevitable in today’s research, especially when tackling complex scientific challenges. My work asks how interdisciplinary training environments impact students’ development of career readiness and innovation capacities. Through NSF-funded programs such as EmPOWERment and BATTERI, our team have examined how bootcamps, mentorship, and other mechanisms impact students' development in innovation capacities and need for cognition. Using mixed-methods approaches, students described how assigned groups challenged them to collaborate across differences, and how reflective practices helped them integrate new perspectives into their work. This research demonstrates how intentionally designed programs can prepare STEM students to navigate complexity and contribute solutions to pressing global problems.

Internationalization

How do higher education institutions construct international students and whose knowledge or abilities are questioned in the process? Higher education often frames international students through deficit-based or neoliberal logics, such as requiring international graduate teaching assistants to pass additional tests before teaching. My collaborative research has critically examined international student service websites to show how institutional discourses reproduce U.S.-centric and colonial narratives. Using critical discourse analysis and equity-centered approaches, I interrogate these practices. Building on this work, I am co-developing the International Student Index, an ongoing project designed to move beyond binary classifications and better capture the diverse contributions of international students.

Innovation 

Innovation capacities are widely recognized as essential for preparing graduate students to address complex global challenges. A central question in my work is whether the tools used to measure these capacities function equivalently for international and domestic students, and whether survey items are interpreted consistently across groups. While instruments like the Innovation Capacities Scale (Selznick & Mayhew, 2018) have been applied in research, their validity for graduate and international student populations has not been fully established. My dissertation addresses this gap through confirmatory factor analysis, reliability testing, and measurement invariance to ensure the scale captures student strengths equitably. In parallel, my collaborative research has applied the scale to evaluate how interdisciplinary Ph.D. training impacts the development of innovation capacities, providing institutions with refined tools and insights to better foster innovation in graduate STEM education.