Teachers College showcased a wide array of educational research and initiatives at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting,“Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Education Research,” held in Los Angeles from April 8–12.
Hundreds of TC faculty, students and alumni presented at the conference on topics ranging from assessment and educational equity to youth participatory research. The depth and breadth of scholarship on display exhibited TC’s commitment to impactful research and practice. Several faculty and alumni were also honored for their contributions to the field of education.
“The outstanding recognition from AERA for our students, faculty, and alumni is critical validation for our work and reminds us of its intrinsic value to the future of education,” said President Thomas Bailey. “I am delighted to have such extraordinary representation at the annual meeting."
[If you or another TC community member you were honored at AERA 2026, please let us know .]
Faculty
Ghiso (left) and Rubin (right). (Photo: TC Archives)
María Paula Ghiso, Professor of Literacy Education, and Beth C. Rubin, Professor of Social Studies Education, received AERA Division G Awards for their outstanding contributions and advancement in research in the social context of education. Ghiso received the Luis Moll Outstanding Book/Creative Work Award, while Rubin received the AERA Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ghiso’s research focuses on literacy development in multilingual and transnational contexts, early literacy, children’s literature and community-based research. She and Professor Gerald Campano received the inaugural Luis C. Moll Book/Creative Work Award for coauthoring “Methods for Community-Based Research: Advancing Educational Justice and Epistemic Rights.” The award honors works that highlight the rich knowledge found in families and communities, reflecting Moll’s legacy and inspiring future research rooted in community engagement.
Rubin’s research explores how civic identity and democratic practices form in classrooms and communities, particularly amid social inequalities. She also collaborates with educators to design and study curricular and pedagogical innovations that build upon this critical, sociocultural understanding of youth civic learning. Her latest initiative, the (CED), promotes active, youth-centered civic learning by integrating youth participatory action research (YPAR) into K-12 classrooms.
Alex Bowers, Professor of Education Leadership, received the Outstanding Reviewer award for his contributions to the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ). The award recognizes Bowers for his exemplary service to the journal over the academic year. At the College, Bowers helps school leaders use data more effectively to help direct the limited resources of schools and districts to specific student needs. His research focuses on the intersection of effective school and district leadership, organization and HR, data driven decision making, student grades and test scores, student persistence and dropouts.
Youmi Suk, Assistant Professor of Applied Statistics, was honored with the AERA Division D Early-Career Award as well as the Outstanding Reviewer Award for the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. She also received the and the this year. Suk specializes in the intersection of data science and causal inference in education. Her research spans five key areas: robust machine learning for causal inference, data-driven personalized learning, process data analysis, test and algorithmic fairness in education, and generative AI for method evaluation. She is committed to advancing methodologies that shape education policies, programs, and practices in meaningful and impactful ways.
Renzhe Yu, Assistant Professor of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining, was honored with the , recognizing the innovation of TICL members who are early researchers in the intersection of technology, instruction, cognition and learning. Yu is the Director of the at TC and a member of the at Columbia University. His research team develops design and evaluation frameworks for responsible AI models and estimates AI's impacts on human behavior and social equity in real-world education systems. He has received multiple awards for papers at international research conferences, received the Emerging Scholar Award from the and was a Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the .
, Contributing Editor at The Hechinger Report, and Director of the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship, received the 2026 Excellence in Media Reporting on Education Research Award, which recognizes individuals who have made noteworthy contributions to reporting on findings, bodies of research, or scholarship in the field of education research. Carr has covered education for more than two decades for publications including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Hechinger Report and more. For five years, she led Columbia Journalism School’s Teacher Project fellowship. She is the author of "Hope Against Hope" a non-fiction book about New Orleans charter schools.
Alumni
Travis J. Bristol (Ph.D. ’15), Associate Professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Education, received the AERA Division K Mid-Career Award. Bristol is faculty director for The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity where he promotes educational equity by supporting robust scholarship. A recipient of the AERA Early Career award in 2025, Bristol’s scholarship centers on the relationship between education policy and teacher experiences, professional learning communities and the ways that race and gender interact with educational systems.
Jacqueline Cofield (Ed.D. ’24), a research affiliate at TC’s , received three AERA Outstanding Dissertation awards for her dissertation, Beyond Beauty: Black Women Artists’ Epistemologies and Aesthetic Praxes. It received recognition from Division B (Curriculum Studies), the Arts & Learning SIG, and the Critical Educators for Social Justice SIG. Cofield, a TC Fulbright scholar, centers her work on arts-based multicultural curriculum, museum education and multimodal research methods. She is advancing this work through her Fulbright initiative, “Toward a Digital Renaissance in Arts & Humanities Research,” 鈥嬧�媤hich seeks to integrate digital humanities and artificial intelligence into curriculum and research practices.
Jamila Lyiscott (Ph.D. ’15), Associate Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts College of Education, received the AERA Mid-Year Career Award for Critical Examinations of Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender. Founding Co-Director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research and Affiliate faculty for TC’s Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, Lyiscott’s community-centered scholarship focuses on racial equity, youth activism and the educational benefits of hip-hop and spoken word in the classroom. Lyiscott was previously awarded the AERA Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award and the Scholar-Activist & Community Advocacy Award from the CESJ SIG.
Gabrielle Oliveira (Ph.D ’15, M.A. ’13), Associate Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education, was honored with the Outstanding Book Award, which recognizes the year’s best book-length publication in education research and development, for Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children's Education, and Dreams for a Better Life. A recipient of the College’s Early Career Award in 2025, Oliveira explores family migration, parenting practices, the education of immigrant children, and the ways schools respond to contemporary migration patterns.
Honey Walrond (Ph.D. ’25), a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley School of Education’s Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity working with fellow alumnus Travis J. Bristol, received the 2025 AERA Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Research on the Superintendency SIG for her dissertation “Leading for Equity: Black Superintendents Cultivating Literacy Excellence for Black Students.” Walrond examines how Black school leaders create affirming environments for Black students and how they engage Black communities in their decision-making. She will continue this work in her upcoming role as Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership at Georgia State University.