Northwestern Brings Emerging Science Educators to Campus
More than two dozen of the world’s most promising emerging scholars in science education gathered at Northwestern University's Evanston campus for the 2025 Sandra K. Abell Institute for Doctoral Students, hosted by the School of Education and Social Policy.
The biennial event, held July 21-25 and sponsored by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, the premier international organization for research on science education, brought 30 doctoral students from 24 universities, 15 states and four countries to campus.
Throughout the week, they worked with 10 experienced mentors to help them move their work forward, including Northwestern School of Education Professor Brian Reiser, the Orrington Lunt Professor of Learning Sciences; postdoctoral scholars Jason Buell and Yang Zhang; Christa Haverly, elementary science manager for Chicago Public Schools; and Karen Hammerness, senior educational research director at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Attendees included School of Education and Social Policy learning sciences graduate students Bradley Davey and Alejandra Frausto-Aceves, and alumnus Nick Leonardi (MSEd19), a PhD candidate in curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The group also included a mentor and two students from SAARMSTE, the Southern African STEM research organization.
Workshops covered everything from building a writing community to demystifying the hidden curriculum of the Ph.D. process, including both tenure-track and non-tenure-track opportunities.
School of Education and Social Policy faculty members led several key sessions:
- Jana Grabarek, assistant director of research practice-partner initiatives, spoke about applied and administrative job opportunities.
- Jen Richards, assistant research professor, discussed her work with the Baxter Center for Science Education.
- Mike Horn, associate professor of computer science and learning sciences; and Nichole Pinkard, Alice Hamilton Professor of Learning Sciences, gave plenary talks on the role of the learning sciences in science education.
- Megan Bang, James E. Johnson Professor of Learning Sciences, and Sepehr Vakil, associate professor of learning sciences, were part of a panel discussing the National Academies report for equity in K-12 STEM education. They both were part of the team that wrote the report.
Grabarek, part of a session on careers outside the academy, shared her journey to, through, and after grad school. Feeling unsatisfied in her job ten years out of college, she tried career counseling, which nudged her toward a master’s degree. Then she grew interested in a doctorate, but entered her PhD program never intending to pursue a tenure-track position.
“These kinds of conversations are especially useful in these uncertain times,” she said. “They help students broaden their job search in ways that hopefully lead to meaningful work, distributed knowledge and skills, generative cross-institutional collaborations, and a stronger field overall.”
Apart from scholarship, the institute is designed to help attendees form professional networks. Buell and Haverly, in fact, met at the Abell Institute in 2017.
“We became fast friends,” Buell said. And soon, colleagues. Haverly started a postdoctoral fellowship at SESP in 2019; Buell arrived a year later.
“One of the very first conversations was about one day hosting the Abell Institute because these are our lifelong colleagues,” said Buell, who, true to his word, organized the 2025 event with Haverly, Zhang, and Reiser.
Photos by Eileen Molony.