Members of Ed School Community Honored

This past spring, a number of Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty members, students, and alumni were recognized for their hard work and achievements with awards and fellowships.

Below is a look at some of the prestigious honors awarded to members of the HGSE community:

• Associate Professor Jal Mehta was named Radcliffe Institute fellow for the 2016–2017 academic year. During his fellowship he will continue to focus on projects related to the improvement of American education.
• Assistant Professor Roberto Gonzales was awarded the Scholars of Color Early Career Contribution Award by the American Education Research Association (AERA). The award is given to a scholar in his or her first decade of postdoctoral work.
• Ed.L.D. candidate Michael Figueroa and Ed.D. candidate Pei Pei Liu were awarded 2016 Meade Fellowships. Figueroa’s research is focused on understanding how college and career readiness programs can be leveraged to transform student learning. Liu’s research examines secondary and postsecondary classrooms as developmental settings and focuses on the role of effective instruction in building teacher-student relationships and supporting student outcomes.
• Ed.D. candidates Abena Subira Mackall, Ed.M.’15, and S. Lynneth Solis, Ed.M.’10, were awarded Julius B. Richmond Fellowships from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University for the 2016–17 academic year. Mackall’s research is on the intersection of education systems and juvenile and criminal justice systems. Solis’ work explores the influence of sociocultural context and the nature of play interactions on learning and development. 
• Solis was also the recipient of the AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship and was appointed a Harvard David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies graduate student associate to support her dissertation, Sociocultural Context of Play: Experiences of Indigenous Children in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. Her fieldwork in Colombia during the 2015–16 academic year was supported by the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship awarded by Harvard and the Society for Research in Child Development Dissertation Funding Award.
• Ph.D. student Sarah Rendon Garcia, Ed.M.’12, was given the 2016 Phi Delta Kappa Research and Innovative Theory to Practice Project in Education award. She also received an honorable mention for the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.
• Ed.D. candidate Megan Powell Cuzzolino, Ed.M.’09, was named a 2015–2017 fellow with Sinai and Synapses, an interdisciplinary program that brings together individuals who are working to elevate the discourse on science and religion.
• Ed.D. candidate Maung Nyeu, Ed.M.’13, was selected by the BBC as one of the 50 inspiring stories of people who have shown real courage and inspiration. He also received the Harvard South Asia Institute's Graduate Research Fellowship for 2016.
• Ed.L.D. candidate Laura Burgos was awarded the Gordon M. Ambach Fellowship for innovative projects and learning opportunities in State Education Agencies (SEAs). She will complete her fellowship work at the Georgia Department of Education where she will examine charter school accountability performance measures.
• Aviva Jacobs, Ed.M.'07, received a 2016 Schusterman Fellowship, awarded to individuals who “see Jewish organizational leadership as an important way to create transformational change in the world.” Jacobs is a vice president of recruitment for Teach For America.
• Megan Marcus, Ed.M.’12, was named an Ashoka fellow for social entrepreneurship. Her organization, FuelEd, works to equip teachers with “the social and emotional competencies essential for building relationships in schools.
• Nick Giacobbe, Ed.M.’15, was named the Innovator of the Year at Chicago Public Schools’ Tech Talk conference. He is a fourth- and fifth-grade special education teacher at Burley Elementary School.
• Heather Leah Ryerson Fountain, Ed.M.’97, was named the National Higher Education Art Educator of the Year by the National Art Education Association. Fountain is an associate professor at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania.
• John Merrow, Ed.D.’73, received the Excellence in Media Reporting on Education Research Award from American Educational Research Association (AERA).
• Katherine Hall Page, Ed.D.’85, received the Malice Domestic’s Lifetime Achievement Award, honoring her career writing what are known as traditional mystery books. 
• Alec Lee, Ed.M.’85, founder and executive director of Aim High, a free summer learning program for San Francisco Bay Area middle-schoolers, was honored at the White House in February as a Champion of Change in summer learning.
• Alexios Kritas, Ed.M.’94, of the Waldorf School in Garden City, New York, was honored in April as a distinguished teacher of 2016 by the Harvard Club of Long Island.

If you are a member of the HGSE community and recently have won an award or achieved a special honor, please email marin_jorgensen@gse.harvard.edu.