Graduate Student

Cynthia Valencia-Ayala

Cynthia Valencia-Ayala is a PhD candidate in the School Psychology program and a practicing school psychologist. Prior to coming to Berkeley and throughout her time in graduate school, Cynthia has worked to provide culturally relevant mental health services to youth experiencing carceral involvement, trauma, and institutionalized racism and poverty. She is most interested in producing research that decriminalizes non-dominant youth and re-conceptualizes the education system.

She currently studies youth perceptions of carceral practices in schools and the extension...

Collette Roberto

Collette is a PhD student working at the intersection of Computer Science (CS) Education and Learning Sciences (LS). She has worked across a number of critical computing education projects and their respective incredible teams. One such incredible team includes Dr. Michelle Wilkerson and Dr. Kris Gutiérrez’s Writing Data Stories project, where middle schoolers transform data to tell sociocritical data narratives. Another incredible team includes Dr. Armando Fox and Dr. Dan Garcia’s Algorithms in Computing Education Lab, where graduates, undergraduates, and professors from across UC...

Corrine Aramburo

Corrine Aramburo is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University. Her research interests include special education teacher preparation; special education teacher knowledge; on-site administration; special education leadership practices; local special education administrators; supporting the education and inclusion of students with extensive support needs; attribution theory; and the social-medical model of disability.

Corrine completed her BA in English and History Education at Brigham...

Diana Casanova

Diana Casanova is a fourth-year doctoral candidate whose research examines the policies and practices that empower family and community stakeholders to affect social change. Her work explores the ways that families and communities participate in and impact education policymaking, illustrating the relationship between democratic engagement and institutional change.

Prior to starting the PhD program, Diana worked in outreach and fundraising for various educational and policy advocacy organizations. She holds a BS in Journalism from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo....

Vasiliki (Vicky) Laina

Vicky is a PhD candidate in the SESAME program and a member of the CoRE lab (Computational Representations in Education). She is interested in better understanding and supporting productive engagement in mathematical argumentation. Proofs have a central place in her work, and she employs low- and high-tech instructional designs to make disciplinary practices associated with the production and communication of proofs accessible to young learners.

Vicky holds an MA in Mathematics Education from the University of Leeds, UK, and the equivalent to a BSc and MSc in Pure and Applied...

Sofia Tancredi

Sofia Tancredi conducts design-based research on sensory and perceptual aspects of learning with an emphasis on neurodiverse learners’ sensory experiences, drawing upon embodied cognition theory. Her work is inspired by her background working with K-12 learners, particularly students identified as having challenges with learning, attention, and behavior in typical classroom contexts. Sofia is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

Specializations and Interests

Educational Design, Neurodiversity, Multimodal Learning Analytics

Qifan Zhang

Qifan Zhang is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, with a concentration in Policy, Politics, and Leadership. Qifan graduated from Tianjin University and received her Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. From there, she continued her studies at Georgetown University and received an MA in Public Policy. Before she came to Berkeley, Qifan interned at the National Institute of Education Sciences of China, a Chinese educational think tank.

She is interested in using quantitative methods to explore issues related to student...

Laleh Coté

A California Bay Area native, Laleh has always been interested in education, music, writing, and people. In her 20s, she discovered a passion for human health and began studying biology at the local community college. As an undergraduate, she was involved in research in molecular biology; microbial ecology; immunology; and natural resources at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab); the University of California, San Francisco; and the University of California, Berkeley.

She received AS and AA degrees in Science and Liberal Arts from Laney College in 2010, and a BA in...

Isabella Brown

Isabella C. Brown is both a Marcus Foster and Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program Fellow. She holds an MA from San Francisco State University and is a second-year PhD student in the Joint Doctoral Program with the University of California, Berkeley. In Spring 2019, she was appointed to the position of Graduate Student Researcher at the UCSF-UC Berkeley Schwab Dyslexia & Cognitive Diversity Center, where her research team has been looking at supports for students with disabilities since the onset of COVID-19 and distance learning, and has been working on a review of empirical autism...

Brittney Cooper

Brittney's research is focused on language development and, in particular, how children develop relational concepts through social interaction and embodied activity. Her current projects are related to language development among children who communicate using Augmentative and Alternative Communication.

Her interests also include supporting students who are both bilingual and have special learning needs. As a school-based Speech and Language Pathologist, Brittney is passionate about promoting additive bilingual environments for students and families....