Ground-breaking researchers join Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship

Alejandro Ganimian is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research sets out to understand how to transform the capacity and support of school systems in low- and middle-income countries to address the needs of their rapidly growing and increasingly diverse student populations. Through partnering with governments and non-profits to embed policies and programs within experiments, he advances evidence on how to improve the academic and social-emotional skills of students who are the first in their families to attend school. During his fellowship, Alejandro will focus on how we should reform classroom instruction to address the needs of large and heterogeneous student groups.

Brenda Wawire is Research Faculty I at the Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University. Her research focuses on strengthening language and literacy skills among learners from linguistically diverse communities. During the fellowship, she will examine how factors such as family traits, home environment, and socioeconomic status impact children’s education outcomes. She will develop a tool to screen for developmental dyslexia, which will be used to screen learners in Kenya. Brenda aims to build evidence about how children’s educational outcomes are influenced and shaped by factors outside of school, focusing on learning variability and developmental dyslexia.

Brenden Tervo-Clemmens is an Assistant Professor at Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, Psychiatry, and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on the impact of substance use on youth brain development and mental health. During his fellowship, Brenden will track day-to-day fluctuations in the executive function skills of adolescents who use smartphones, such as the capacity to plan ahead and exhibit self-control.

Jessica Schleider is an Associate Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University in the United States. Her professional mission is to ensure that all youth with mental health needs have access to effective support, precisely when, where, and how they wish to receive it. For Jessica, “tackling this complex problem requires cross-disciplinary collaboration, methods, and perspectives.”

Joshua Jeong is an Assistant Professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health at Emory University. His research examines the role of fathers in early child development, and he currently collaborates with community-based organizations, international organizations, and governments in Tanzania and Kenya to improve early child development. During his fellowship, he plans to expand the scope of a planned parenting intervention for couples with young children in Tanzania by specifically testing different strategies for engaging fathers in the community-based program. For Joshua, “The Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship will propel my research on the role of fathers in promoting early child development in low- and middle-income countries.”

Laurel Raffington is the Research Group Leader of the Max Planck Research Group Biosocial at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Her research seeks to uncover how early-life interventions impact children’s lifespan learning and development, focusing on cellular-level changes and revealing “sleeper” intervention effects on children’s learning. Laurel will focus on biomarkers in socio-demographically diverse child cohorts using saliva. Overall, her research aims to make a significant difference in the lives of children by improving how we design and evaluate child education policy and practice.

Margherita Malanchini is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological and Behavioral Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. As a developmental psychologist, she directs the Cognitive, Development, and Education (CoDE) research laboratory. Her research seeks to understand why children and adolescents differ in their learning, behavior, and cognition by examining psycho-social and biological pathways. For Margherita, “the overlap between neurodevelopmental and disruptive behavior disorders is critically under-researched”. During her fellowship, she hopes to bridge this gap in knowledge by investigating the combined impact of neurodevelopmental and disruptive behavior disorders on learning and child development.

Nia Nixon is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education and the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research examines using technology to make learning more inclusive and supportive. During her fellowship, she will focus on using technology to make science and mathematics learning more accessible and welcoming for everyone, particularly for girls and students from diverse backgrounds. Her work will bring together researchers from across the globe, sharing insights and strategies to ensure every child can thrive in a tech-driven future. For Nia, her aim is “to ensure that every student, regardless of their background, feels valued and engaged in the classroom.”

Nicholas Judd is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Donders Institute. As a cognitive neuroscientist, his research is focused on environmental causes behind cognitive differences in childhood development. For Nicholas “Identifying the influence of environmental factors on the brain is paramount, given the lifelong impacts of neural and cognitive disparities.” During his fellowship, he will focus on isolating three environmental factors contributing to cognitive and neural development: education, pollution, and resource deprivation.

Pilar Álamos Valenzuela is an Assistant Professor at the School of Education, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her research looks at teacher-child interactions and relationships that matter for young children’s emotional and social development. During her fellowship, she will describe and explain how and why teacher-child interactions vary within and between classrooms. Pilar is keen to see how this variability is linked to child outcomes, and how teachers and children perceive their relationship with one another.

Roman Stengelin is a Senior Scientist at the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. His research identifies cultural and situational factors shaping childhood development. Working with children from diverse cultural communities, he studies how culture shapes social behaviors. During his fellowship, Roman will examine how group size impacts behaviors such as collaboration and social learning by comparing children from diverse communities, including urban Germany and rural Namibia.

Sofie Valk is a Research Group Leader of the Lise Meitner group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Her research aims to develop new analytical tools to decipher brain function and behavior. During her fellowship, Sofie aims to deepen understanding of how factors such as neglect and environment affect the brain’s hippocampus and hopes her research can lead to better intervention and support systems that promote healthier development in children.

Valentina Duque is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. She is an economist working at the intersection of health and development economics. During her fellowship, Valentina will work on projects examining how housing relocation programs that move families to better neighborhoods can influence the outcomes of children in the developing world. The findings of her research will help to shape policies that have the potential to transform the lives of children, especially those in the most deprived contexts of the world.