Thanks for your interest in my work!

I am an Assistant Professor of Science Education in the Division of Curriculum & Instruction in the Charter College of Education at the California State University, Los Angeles.

I earned my Ph.D. from Michigan State University and my M.Ed./B.S. degrees from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida.

I have over 10 years of educational work experience, including working with the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, teaching high school science and middle school engineering.

For my dissertation, I worked with youth and preservice teachers in a longitudinal study unpacking how to imagine and enact youth-centered, equity-oriented practices (YCEOs) in teacher education. For this work, I received the 2020 American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) Outstanding Dissertation Award. My dissertation research was funded by the 2012 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and Gates Millennium Scholarship.

Currently, I am the principal investigator of The T(h)inker Place, a research project/team (funded via internal grants from the CCOE and seeking to expand with NSF funding in the near future) dedicated to developing counternarratives of youth in teacher learning through a combination of humanizing-and-geo-localizing engineering design as a way to identifying problems and designing solutions within classroom spaces--creating critically conscious teaches that engage in intersections of praxis in teaching work (Nazar et al., 2019).

In my spare time, I work on developing my podcast, Majestic Academic, which aims to address problems of practice in academia and K-12 education by personally analyzing the political impacts of current events in (my) our lives.