Brayboy, Bang Honored During Investiture Ceremonies
Northwestern University celebrated the distinguished careers of Dean Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy and Professor Megan Bang during investiture ceremonies that recognized their groundbreaking contributions to education, access, and community-centered research.
Both faculty members at the School of Education and Social Policy were praised as visionary thinkers who don’t just study learning — they build and implement real-world solutions in partnership with the communities they serve.
“Your commitment and contributions are felt by everybody,” said Provost Kathleen Hagerty. “And your talents for bringing people together to build a community are immensely valued by the University.”
Bryan Brayboy: Disrupting to Build
Brayboy, the Carlos Montezuma Professor and dean of SESP, is a leading anthropologist whose work centers on expanding educational opportunities for underrepresented communities.
Before joining Northwestern in 2023, Brayboy helped lead the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University — a pioneering initiative to broaden access to higher education. He also served as vice president of social advancement, senior advisor to the president, and director of the Center for Indian Education.
Brayboy has long focused on strengthening Native education. His Spencer Foundation-funded dissertation while at the University of Pennsylvania explored how Native American students succeeded at Ivy League institutions despite facing systemic barriers. His findings highlighted the power of social networks and cultural connections.
“Bryan follows through on building learning opportunities for actual people,” said his adviser, Frederick Erickson, George F. Kneller PRofessor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
His work evolved into a focus on tribal nation-building and preparing teachers to serve tribal communities. Over his career, he has secured more than $12 million in grants, supporting the preparation of 167 teachers — 90% of whom remain in the field.
He also coined the concept of tribal critical race theory (or “tribal crit,”) a theory rooted in Indigenous experiences that is now foundational in the field. That work has been cited in the literature almost 2,600 times.
Building Institutions, Shaping Futures
Brayboy’s leadership helped launch a doctoral program at Arizona State that graduated 12 American Indian PhDs in one year — nearly 20% of the national total that year. He has chaired or co-chaired 43 doctoral dissertations for Indigenous students throughout his career.
Recently, his work has shifted to planetary health and global conservation. he was the lead architect on an academic unit that is called the School of Conservation Futures at Arizona State University. This School sought connect Indigenous knowledge with modern science and technology. He hopes to build on this effort at Northwestern.
“Throughout my career, I’ve aimed to be disruptive in a constructive way — rethinking methods and connecting stories as part of rigorous research,” he said. “The goal is always to disrupt to build something meaningful.”
A member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, Brayboy received the George and Louise Spindler Award from the Council on Anthropology and Education for a lifetime of work shaping the field of educational anthropology, K-12 schools, and higher education.
Megan Bang: Reimagining Science and Healing Through Education
Bang, the James Johnson Professor of Learning Sciences, earned her PhD from Northwestern and has since become one of the nation’s most influential voices in education, science learning, and Indigenous knowledge systems.
Her work focuses on culture, families, STEM education, and the design of transformative learning environments.
Bang’s superpower is her ability to walk into a room of senior scholars and change their minds, said her former adviser and current colleague Bruce Sherin.
“She pushes boundaries but is always open to all sides of a question,” Sherin said. “She can change your mind because it always seems possible you might change hers.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education, Bang was recently named to the board of directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
At Northwestern, she directs the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, helping reshape how Indigenous communities engage with and transform academic institutions.
Bang co-created Learning in Places, a National Science Foundation–funded project that uses outdoor and field-based investigations to connect science, civics, and social studies with real-world challenges. The initiative builds on decades of work regenerating Indigenous models of education rooted in land and water.
She is deeply interested in how education can be used as a form of medicine — a tool for healing, not harm.
“Where I come from, medicine is not just for when you’re sick — it’s what keeps you healthy,” she said. “Education can be the greatest possibility for cultivating the world we want.”
Building Better Futures
Bang’s impact on the field of learning sciences, which studies how people learn across contexts and invents new instructional strategies, has been profound, said Professor Emerita Carol Lee, who has known Bang since she was a graduate student. “Understanding the natural world has become deeply embedded in the field and part of a profound effort to understand knowledge development and acquisition in everyday settings,” Lee said.
Shirin agreed, adding that the most important contributions from faculty don’t just change how we teach; they change the very content and goals of learning.
“Megan’s work is nothing short of a complete re-envisioning of science learning," he said. " It’s not just about teaching science in a new way, but reconceptualizing what science is.”
Photos by David Johnson