PPFP Faculty Members

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More about Hyejin

HyeJin Hwang's research interests revolve around reading comprehension and content learning (science, social studies) in K-12 settings, especially for multilingual students.

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More about Kelly

My research interests are focused on improving secondary biology education and graduate student training. Specifically, I am investigating how life sciences graduate programs train their students for the variety of career paths both within and beyond academia. In addition, my work considers how we can train faculty and teaching assistants to be more inclusive and aware of the experiences of the students in their classes. 

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More about Meixi

Meixi is a Hokkien/Hokchiu teacher-scholar-sister-daughter-auntie-learning scientist who grew up across the lands and waters of Singapore and northern Thailand. In her Ph.D. with Dr. Megan Bang at the University of Washington, Meixi explores the intersections and connections within home and school and how through community and participatory design research, schools can be partners in community resurgence of Indigenous knowledges, educational justice, and the living of socioecological flourishing futures in Thailand and Mexico. At the U of M, she will be the American Indian Studies department with Dr. Vince Diaz, and is excited to continue working within global & trans-Indigenous research, and felt desires for educational designs that restore our relations and our responsibilities in ways that perpetuate all life.

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More about Magdala

Magdala Lissa Jeudy earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University in Romance Studies in 2021. Her research focuses on the ways that French Naturalist narratives complicate our notions of normal, which define modern medical practices and philosophies from the nineteenth century to the present day. Her work is built on philological, historical, and intersectional approaches that aim to disrupt medical constructs of disability, gender, and race, to advance conversations about healthcare disparities and equity. As an educator, she is committed to a pedagogy that is a process of inquiry, which allows students to question their deeply entrenched assumptions, reconfigure concepts of normalcy, and accept the unique circumstances of others leading to recognition and celebration of diversity.

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More about Charisse

Charisse Pickron is originally from Amherst, MA. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a major in Psychology and a minor in Race and Racial Identity Development in 2008. Following graduation, she worked at Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL for two years. She completed a 12-month internship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she further explored her interest in a career in developmental psychology. At the University of Massachusetts, Charisse completed her Master's in 2015 under the advisement of Dr. Lisa Scott and her Ph.D. in 2018 with Dr. Erik Cheries. Her work focuses on socio-cognitive development focusing on infants' perception and representation of social groups along gender and race.

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More about Aditi

My research explores how leadership shifts policies and practices towards more racially just schools and systems. I employ community-engaged and participatory design research methods to build more authentic and equitable collaborations between universities, schools, and communities. I draw on critical and Indigenous theories to center the knowledges, histories, experiences, and agency of communities of color leading equity-focused organizational change.

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More about Cat

Cat Saint-Croix earned her Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2018. Her work focuses on epistemology, which concerns knowledge, belief, and evidence, along with philosophy of language, logic, and feminist philosophy. She is especially interested in the ways that the insights of feminist philosophy can be applied to and developed within these areas.

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More about Jessica

Jessica Horvath Williams teaches and researches at the crossroads of 19th century U.S. Literature and feminist disability studies, with emphases on questions of women’s writing, domestic labor, and literary form. She is a black, queer, femme, first-generation, autistic activist and educator in the Twin Cities, who works with healthcare professionals on disability issues, and their intersections of these issues with race, gender/sexuality, and citizenship. Her work has appeared in Studies in American Fiction.

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More about Mingzi

Mingzi Xu received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Oklahoma in 2014. She has been a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University since 2015. Her research focuses on the evolution and genetic basis of mating recognition and preference traits. During her Ph.D., she studied the selective forces driving the evolution of mate recognition from a behavioral ecological perspective. During her previous postdoctoral studies, she extended her research to evolutionary genetics and genomics of sexual signals and mating preferences. At the University of Minnesota, she will combine behavioral ecology and evolutionary genetics approaches to understand the evolution of choosiness in female mate choice.

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More about Shahrin

Shahrin Upoma, PhD, is an assistant professor in the leadership and management area at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Her research interest lies at the intersection of diversity, equity, and social justice in public and nonprofit management.

Her agenda is to produce work that can be used by professionals, industry experts, and others trusted with the decision-making process.

Dr. Upoma’s commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion through her teaching and research is grounded in her personal experience as a woman of color, first-generation student, and immigrant. 

She holds a PhD in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she also served as a teaching assistant. She earned a master's degree in economics from the University of North Texas, and a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.