Who we are shapes how we experience educational spaces.

This strand of my research examines how culture, identity, and community influence students’ experiences in biology and STEM. Much of this work has drawn on Community Cultural Wealth to challenge deficit-oriented accounts of students from historically marginalized communities and instead examine the knowledge, relationships, aspirations, languages, and navigational resources they bring with them.

My work with Latin* biology students has explored cultural wealth, belonging, servingness at Hispanic-serving institutions, and the ways students negotiate identity across educational transitions. Autoethnographic and reflective work has allowed me to examine these questions from another direction by asking how my own experiences as a learner and educator can illuminate the educational structures in which identity becomes visible, celebrated, negotiated, or compartmentalized.

Current work continues to expand these questions through culturally grounded qualitative approaches, identity-centered pedagogy, and scholarship examining how educational environments make different ways of knowing and being possible.

Sometimes the things students love outside of school are also things they have spent years becoming experts in.

My growing work on popular culture, games, fandom, and informal learning examines what becomes possible when education treats those interests as intellectual resources rather than distractions or decorative examples.

Projects involving Pokémon, superheroes, movies, games, museums, and other forms of popular culture explore how learners move between familiar fictional worlds and disciplinary science. I am especially interested in what happens beyond the initial moment of engagement: how knowledge built through fandom can support comparison, questioning, evidence evaluation, explanation, critique, and new scientific understanding.

My goal is not simply to make science more entertaining. It is to better understand how the things people genuinely care about can become meaningful pathways into learning.

Belonging is shaped not only by what students bring with them, but also by the environments they are asked to navigate.

This strand examines educational pathways, institutional structures, relationships, and support systems that shape whether students can access opportunities and persist through challenges. My work has explored socioeconomic context, transitions into biology, working while enrolled in STEM, mentorship, help-seeking, and the difference between support being technically available and students actually being able to use it.

I am particularly interested in the moments when students have resources, knowledge, or motivation but encounter friction in translating them into forms that educational institutions recognize or reward.

Ultimately, this work asks how we can design learning environments that require students to spend less energy figuring out how to belong and more energy learning, exploring, and becoming.