The Reed Fellow plays a vital role in the development of WISHfest and participates in a fireside chat with our keynote speaker(s).
Kristen Govoni, Ph.D, is associate dean of academic programs at UConn’s College of Agriculture, Health & Natural Resources, director of the Ratcliffe Hicks School of Agriculture, and professor of animal science. She is also a nationally-recognized educator and researcher in animal growth, metabolism, and development.
The Reed Fellow plays a vital role in the development of WISHfest and participates in a fireside chat with our keynote speaker(s).
Sally Reis is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and previously held the Letitia Neag Morgan Chair in Educational Psychology in the Neag School of Education at UConn.. Her research interests relate to talent development, enrichment pedagogy, twice exceptional students, as well as talented girls and women. She has authored over 300 articles, books, book chapters, technical reports and worked a research team that has generated over 50 million dollars during the last few decades.
Using the pedagogy of gifted and talented education enables teachers to develop strengths, interests, and talents in a broad range of students, including those with disabilities. Enrichment pedagogy helps teachers differentiate instruction, reduce underachievement, and enable students to develop their strengths, while reducing a focus on deficits. This session will briefly highlight this pedagogy and describe how it can be implemented to help students identify and develop their interests and strengths.
The Reed Fellow plays a vital role in the development of WISHfest and participates in a fireside chat with our keynote speaker(s).
Arash Zaghi is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut. In 2009, he received his Ph.D. in civil Eengineering from the University of Nevada, Reno. After he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at age 33, he began engineering education research aimed at highlighting the importance of neurodiversity for the creativity of our nation’s engineering workforce by promoting a fundamentally strength-based perspective toward diversity. He started his engineering education research endeavor through an NSF RIGEE grant in 2014. The promising findings of this research and the encouraging feedback of the student community motivated him to pursue this line of research in his NSF CAREER award in 2017. Since then, he has built a coalition within the university to expand this work through multiple NSF-funded research grants including IUSE/PFE: RED titled “Innovation Beyond Accommodation: Leveraging Neurodiversity for Engineering Innovation”. Because of the importance of neurodiversity at all levels of education, he expanded his work to graduate STEM education through an NSF IGE grant. In addition, he recently received his Mid-CAREER award through which, in a radically novel approach, he will take on ambitious, transdisciplinary research integrating artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and education research to advance a personalized tool to enhance the participation of middle-school students with dyslexia in STEM disciplines. His efforts on promoting neurodiversity in engineering has been twice recognized by Prism Magazine of the American Society of Engineering Education.
The Reed Fellow plays a vital role in the development of WISHfest and participates in a fireside chat with our keynote speaker(s).
Sandra M. Chafouleas, Ph.D. is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Neag Endowed Professor in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Chafouleas is also the founder and co-director of the UConn Collaboratory on School and Child Health (CSCH), as well as the co-founder of Feel Your Best Self. Her work focuses on assisting schools in implementation of policies and practices that support the whole child, with specific expertise in strategies to support mental health and emotional well-being.