Third Annual Robing Ceremony Honors PhDs
Fourteen new PhDs were honored and gifted regalia before the 2026 convocation celebration during the third annual doctoral robing ceremony at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy.
The ceremony recognized graduates from SESP's three doctoral programs — Human Development and Social Policy, Learning Sciences, and the joint Computer Science and Learning Sciences program. Each was among the first of its kind in the nation and continues to inspire innovation in education and research.
HDSP students examine how policy affects people — and how people, in turn, influence policy — across the human lifespan. The Learning Sciences program integrates cognition, social context and design to improve how people learn.
The Computer Science and Learning Sciences program, offered between the School of Education and Social Policy and the McCormick School of Engineering, explores how technology can support learning across all ages and contexts.
Read more about our newest honorees:
Alejandra Frausto Aceves | Learning Sciences
Dissertation: "Amasando y Enseñando: Exploring Families' Interconnected Ways of Knowing & Teaching"
Advised by: Shirin Vossoughi and Megan Bang
Committee: Megan Bang, Rochelle Gutiérrez, Ananda Marin, Brian Reiser, Shirin Vossoughi
Frausto Aceves used hands-on, community-involved methods to study how diasporic families engage in sophisticated polymodal teaching and learning. For her dissertation, she explored the intergenerational tradition of making tortillas across families in the US, Mexico, and Guatemala to understand how families’ interconnected ways of knowing and teaching might inform science education. Frausto Aceves was awarded an incoming Cognitive Science Fellowship her first year by the Cognitive Science Program Committee at Northwestern. Her research was also supported by a Sandra K. Abell Institute for Doctoral Students Fellowship in 2025 and a National Association for Research in Science Teaching Graduate Student Travel Award.
Lara Altman | Human Development and Social Policy
Dissertation: "The Making of a Trauma-Informed, Healing-Centered State: Cross-Sector Collaboration as Interstitial Issue Field Development"
Advised by: Jeannette Colyvas
Committee: Tabitha Bonilla, Cynthia Coburn, Colyvas
Altman is a public health practitioner focusing on childhood adversity and adolescent well-being who has worked in nonprofit, healthcare and local government settings. Her dissertation examined how schools officially adopt and use methods that account for students' past trauma. Altman holds a master's in public health and a master's in social work from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor's in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. At SESP, she served as teaching assistant for the Honors Thesis program and won an American Educational Research Association Student Travel Award.
Umit Aslan | Learning Sciences
Dissertation: "Reimagining Research Methods in an Age of Complexity: Studying People's Reasoning of Complex Systems Through Agent-Based-Construction Interviews"
Advised by: Uri Wilensky
Committee: Sharona Levy, Bruce Sherin, Wilensky
Aslan says he loves "trying to figure out how people think about things that are complex and counterintuitive." While at SESP, he taught himself to code to build tools to help him do it — including an interactive dictionary for Uri Wilensky's NetLogo modeling system and Mode Catcher, which converts students' explanations into network graphs capturing how they think about complexity.
In his dissertation, Aslan invented a new procedure for capturing how students grapple with complicated ideas. Aslan called these agent-based construction interviews, or ABC interviews. He was lead author of a 2024 paper in Science Education on computational thinking in high school science units.
Forrest Bruce | Learning Sciences
Dissertation: "Wenji-Bimaadiziyang: Constructing Human-Water Relations Through Indigenous Knowledge Systems"
Advised by: Megan Bang
Committee: Bang, Bryan Brayboy, Doug Medin, Shirin Vossoughi
Bruce's dissertation explores how people learn to care for and think about water, arguing that education is key to building just, sustainable relationships with the natural world. In 2024, he received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. A SESP alumnus, he worked in Chicago Public Schools' American Indian Education Program (Title VI) before joining the ISTEAM research project, first as a research coordinator and later as a graduate student.
Victoria Concepción Chávez | Computer Science and Learning Sciences
Dissertation: "Good Intentions Are Not Enough: An Analysis of Ableism Within Broadening Participation Efforts in Computing"
Advised by: Marcelo Worsley
Committee: Moya Bailey, Bryan Dewsbury, Rua Williams, Marcelo Worsley
An educator, scholar and engineer, Chávez is passionate about accessibility, computer science education and social justice. Her research examines how college computer science policies, teaching practices and course design can unintentionally disadvantage students with disabilities. The National Science Foundation's plans for broadening participation in computing were found to be lacking, according to her research.
Fortunate Kelechi Ekwuruke | Human Development and Social Policy
Dissertation: "Narrative Frames, Identity Development, and the Sociopolitical Contexts of Housing Insecure Adolescents"
Advised by: Sally A. Nuamah
Committee: Dan P. McAdams, Nuamah, Leoandra Onnie Rogers, Krystal Strong
A spoken word poet and researcher, Ekwuruke focuses on helping vulnerable populations access services. Her research addresses housing insecurity, adolescent development, education and nongovernmental organizations, primarily in West Africa. Ekwuruke collected data in Nigeria, requiring a lengthy bus commute over difficult terrain outside Lagos. Her research site — a haven for formerly unhoused and out-of-school youth — had little running water, electricity or internet access. She stayed for months, "not only learning from a group of young people who many scholars might overlook, but also giving back — hosting celebrations, poetry, being a resource," Nuamah said.
Nick LaGrassa | Computer Science and Learning Sciences
Dissertation: "Toward Humanizing Computing Education: Identity-Centered Design in a Fifth-Grade Creative Coding Unit"
Advised by: Michael Horn
Committee: Horn, Nichole Pinkard, Sepehr Vakil
For the past five years, LaGrassa has nearly single-handedly maintained a relationship with local Evanston schools, recruiting 40 to 50 Northwestern students to work in fifth-grade computer science classrooms. A National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, LaGrassa was a teacher in several under-resourced districts before going to graduate school to make an impact at a systemic level. He was drawn to using computing and software platforms to address resource gaps. "System building is a passion of mine," he said. "I also love working with undergrads to help them contribute to the project in ways that I can't."
Sarah Priscilla Lee | Learning Sciences
Dissertation: "Live in the Along: Interstitial Pedagogy and Design-Based Research in Refugee Education"
Advised by: Marcelo Worsley
Committee: Kris D. Gutiérrez, Shirin Vossoughi, Worsley
Lee studied how researchers and young people collaboratively design learning programs, proposing a framework for recognizing the unscripted, in-between moments where the most powerful learning happens. Her work centered on a local community organization she began working with in 2017 — a collaboration that still exists. She was a fellow of the International Society of Learning Sciences Doctoral Consortium in 2024 and received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship from 2020 to 2023.
Melanie Muskin | Human Development and Social Policy
Dissertation: "Early Childhood, Social Media, and the Digital Reweaving of Communities of Practice"
Advised by: Cynthia Coburn and Terri Sabol
Committee: Coburn, Claudia Haase, Sabol
Muskin's work explores how educational systems can better support the well-being and professional growth of teachers and school leaders. Before academia, she worked as a teacher and school leader in early childhood and elementary settings in New York City. Muskin recently received a Search Institute Summer Scholars Fellowship and earned the American Educational Research Association Teachers' Work/Teachers Unions Outstanding Student Paper Award for her study of teachers' resignation stories on TikTok.
Vien Nguyen | Learning Sciences
Dissertation: "Education for Civic Data Science"
Advised by: Reed Stevens
Committee: Jen Munson, Stevens, Sepehr Vakil
Nguyen, who will join the SESP faculty as a lecturer in the Master's in Technology, People, and Policy program, co-taught the course Technology in Context, which was based on his dissertation work. His research examined a local volunteer organization of data scientists who build technologies for civic and social good in their free time.
Leah Ouellet | Human Development and Social Policy
Dissertation: "'Irreparable Corruption' and Shifting American Penal Thought"
Advised by Simone Ispa-Landa
Committee: Ispa-Landa, Dan P. McAdams, Quinn Mulroy
Ouellet, who begins an assistant professor role at Rutgers University in the fall, researches how young people grow and develop and how the U.S. criminal legal system treats them, with particular interest in what happens when young people receive the harshest possible sentences — and what science tells us about why that matters. Prior to Northwestern, she worked as a mitigation specialist for juvenile lifers at the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office, facilitated creative writing workshops at prisons in the Detroit area and co-directed an annual poetry event exploring perspectives of the criminal legal system. Ouellet was named to the National Institute of Justice Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Ashley Quiterio | Learning Sciences
Dissertation: "Agentic Data Futures: Teaching and Learning for Personal Data Interactions"
Advised by: Marcelo Worsley
Committee: Megan Bang, Michelle Wilkerson, Worsley
Quiterio, a data scientist at heart, helped create a new fifth-grade curriculum for Evanston/Skokie School District 65 and mentored students as part of Data Science 4 Everyone. Her dissertation examined how to teach data literacy to young people and how to connect learners' identities and practices to their data education futures. Quiterio was named a Spencer Foundation Quantitative, Computational and Mixed Methodologies Scholar.
Michael Smith | Computer Science and Learning Sciences
Dissertation: "From Sports Practice to Sports Praxis: Designing for Formal Sports HCI Learning Spaces"
Advised by: Marcelo Worsley
Committee: Vishesh Kumar, Jolie Matthews, Marcelo Worsley
Smith, trained as a computer scientist, is also bringing a learning scientist's lens to a new research community around sports and computer science. His dissertation examined how learning to use technology shapes not just students' skills but how they see themselves — a class he helped design and has taught for the past five years.
Karla R. Thomas | Human Development and Social Policy
Dissertation: "Smuggling Black Truths: BlackCrit Sensemaking and Fugitivity in Service of Black Educational Futures"
Advised by: James Spillane
Committee: Spillane, kihana miraya ross, Shirin Vossoughi
Thomas's research focuses on how parents, teachers and communities resist and refuse education policies that harm Black and LGBTQ+ students. Her dissertation looks specifically at how Black parents and educators understood and responded in the wake of Florida's anti-Black Stop W.O.K.E education laws while also finding ways to expand opportunities for Black students. Before academia, Thomas spent 14 years as an executive in global operations management. She holds two master's degrees from Northwestern — one in education and one from the Kellogg School of Management — and a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the University of Mississippi. Thomas received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.