In Brief
Kate Cichon, (pictured above) assistant director for the Center for Talent Development, was named 2026 SESP staff member of the year.
Professor Cynthia Coburn received the Martin E. and Gertrude G. Walder Award for Research Excellence.
Peri Green, a learning sciences graduate student, received Northwestern’s prestigious Presidential Fellowship for her work exploring how children’s environments can create or reduce opportunities for learning.
Professor Claudia Haase spoke at the TEDxNorthwesternU conference on the importance of moments of connection for relationships, health, and the lifespan.
Professor Sneha Kumar coauthored the article “Who Can Have a Baby? Social Norms and the Right to Reproduce,” which was published in the American Sociological Review and won the award for distinguished contribution to population scholarship at the 2026 American Sociological Association annual meeting.
Natalie Araujo Melo (PhD26) won the 2026 award for doctoral dissertation excellence from the Network of the Learning Sciences in Canada.
Assistant professor of instruction John Olson participated in a panel for the Federal Reserve’s Connecting Communities series, presenting research on “benefits cliffs”—the pitfalls in the US tax and transfer system that inhibit upward mobility.
Jacob Puthipiroj, who is pursuing his doctorate in computer science and learning sciences, discussed his work on using a spiral curriculum (revisiting ideas at increasing levels of complexity) as a formal model of learning at Northwestern’s annual Computation and Data Exchange. His research focuses on AI education, knowledge representation, and computational linguistics.
Professor Brian Reiser, postdoctoral scholars Jason Buell and Yang Zhang, and senior program coordinator Kelsey Edwards (BS13, MS20) were part of the writing team that won the Research Worth Reading award from the Journal of Research on Science Teaching. Reiser led the OpenSciEd Elementary Developers Consortium, which generated 24 free science curriculum units for kindergarten through fifth grade.
The EC * REACH early childhood research hub, codirected by professor Terri Sabol*, drew nearly 300 researchers, providers, and policymakers to Chicago for its second annual conference.
New research coauthored by professor Hannes Schwandt, published in the American Economic Review and covered by The Economist and other news outlets, suggests that younger children are more likely than their older siblings to be hospitalized for respiratory illness during the first months of life.
Professor James Spillane and doctoral student Sam Keillor presented their paper “Becoming a City Principal: New Principals’ Sense-Making About the ‘Visibility Imperative’ and Emotional Labor” at the annual European Conference on Educational Research.
Postdoctoral scholars Karla Thomas (PhD26) and briana rodríguez won 2026 National Academy of Education/Spencer Research Fellowships. Graduate students Andrew Stein and Corey Winchester received the organization’s dissertation fellowships.
Doctoral student Caryn Tran was lead author of the study “Starting from Scratch Again and Again: Tracing the Origins of High Schoolers’ Negative Perceptions of Block-Based Programming,” which earned a best paper award at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Professor Shirin Vossoughi was elected a fellow of the International Society of Learning Sciences for her work studying how and why people learn.