School News

Trautvetter to Retire

Founding director of the Higher Education Administration and Policy program professor Lois Trautvetter is retiring after more than three decades at SESP. HHer path to academia wasn’t linear: She considered law, majored in chemistry, then earned a master’s in chemical engineering before completing a PhD in higher education administration at the University of Michigan.

“As a scientist, I look at life as really one big experiment,” she says. “As Albert Einstein said, ‘Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.’”

Trautvetter joined Northwestern as a postdoc in 1992. When Trautvetter’s mentor died in 1998, dean Penelope Peterson recruited her to teach his course just weeks after she’d given birth—a moment Trautvetter calls a career turning point. In 2003 she was hired to build the HEAP, now one of the country’s top programs in the field, with more than 500 graduates.

Her research examined women’s experiences in STEM and, later, mentoring’s role in recruiting and retaining underrepresented groups. Colleagues and former students describe Trautvetter as relentless and a “masterful connector.” She officially retires in 2027; until then, she’ll continue her research with astrophysicists, mathematicians, biologists, and robotics engineers to explore the mentoring, career development, and team dynamics that shape who goes into—and remains in—STEM fields.

SESP Ranked No. 2 Education School

The School of Education and Social Policy earned its highest rating in school history, landing second among graduate schools of education in U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 national rankings. The achievement underscores the school’s consistent standing among the nation’s best: Since breaking into the top 10 in 2002, SESP has never fallen outside the top 15, reflecting its ongoing commitment to students and to interdisciplinary work, research, and innovation.

Can Creativity and AI Coexist?

Northwestern’s spring conference on art and creativity in the age of AI examined a central tension among artists: Some embrace AI as a tool, while others resist it.

“The question isn’t whether the technology is useful or helps us work faster,” said Dan Perlman (BS12), artist in residence at the Center for Responsible Tech, Policy, and Public Dialogue. “It’s whether, in automating so much, we’re failing to develop the skills that help us find our voice—missing out on relationships and losing one of the most vital elements of art: its collaborative nature.”

The two-day conference, organized by SESP professors Sepehr Vakil, Michael Horn, and Claudia Haase, featured short talks, student panels, and poster sessions—and ended with music and stand-up comedy at Sketchbook Brewing Company. Panelists included Google Creative Lab’s Aaron Wade and artist Molly Jones alongside Perlman. Students presented capstone projects and posters and discussed a new undergraduate course on AI and creativity.

Keynote speaker Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression, argued that AI systems reinforce existing racism and inequality. She introduced the concept of “data double consciousness”—how data systems misrepresent underserved communities. She closed by noting that art can help people “transform these conversations” and become “far more powerful than the tech industry wants us to be.”

Brayboy Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Dean Bryan Brayboy was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. Northwestern’s first Native American dean and a citizen of the Lumbee tribe, Brayboy studies how Indigenous people learn, teach, and see themselves within larger systems of power. He joins the academy’s 2026 class alongside the Feinberg School of Medicine’s Joseph T. Bass and honorees including actor Jodie Foster and writer Colson Whitehead. An education anthropologist known for rigorous scholarship paired with humor and humility, Brayboy began developing tribal critical race theory in 2005, a groundbreaking framework examining race, power, and Indigenous sovereignty.

First Associate Dean for Master’s and Professional Education

Miriam Gamoran Sherin was named associate dean for master’s and professional education, a new role that reflects the growing scope and importance of those programs to the school. The Alice Gabrielle Twight Professor of Learning Sciences, Sherin will provide academic and organizational leadership across the school’s portfolio of master’s, certificate, and professional development programs. A member of the National Academy of Education, Sherin joined the Northwestern faculty in 1997 and has served in several leadership roles at SESP, including director of undergraduate education and associate dean for teacher education.

First NetLogo Conference Bridges Research and Teaching

Northwestern hosted the first NetLogo Conference, bringing together academics and K–12 teachers to share, learn, and connect. The free software tool used by hundreds of thousands worldwide lets researchers, teachers, artists, and students simulate complex systems, from forest fires and tick infestations to traffic jams and disease outbreaks. Users program individual “agents” within a system, then watch what unfolds as the agents interact.

NetLogo creator and Northwestern professor Uri Wilensky—a recent winner of the Yidan Prize for his work developing the tool—opened June event with a keynote conversation with Jacob Kelter (PhD25), pictured, executive director of the NetLogo Center at SESP. Other speakers included Josh Epstein, founding director of the New York University Agent-Based Modeling Laboratory, and Moira Zellner, director of participatory modeling and data science at Northeastern University.

NetLogo’s versatility was on display throughout the talks and workshops, drawing experts from many fields. Rebecca Vandewalle, a computational geographer with a background in classical archaeology, said NetLogo lets her study familiar questions with new precision.

“We have powerful tools to explore spatial patterns, but software like NetLogo allows us to connect patterns with the processes that may have generated them,” said Vandewalle, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida.

Lin Xiang, an associate professor of science education at the University of Kentucky, has used NetLogo for more than 15 years to teach science and praised the tool’s ability to provide a comprehensive view of the natural world.

“Users can wander anywhere they like and even alter the environment to observe the long-term impacts,” Xiang said. “They gain a deeper understanding of the system. For educators, this flexibility means there is no single right way to use NetLogo, opening many possibilities for the science classroom.”