Graduate Student Fellows
Niyonta Chowdhury-Magnata
Niyonta Nahia Chowdhury-Magaña (she/they) is a 1st generation Bangladeshi-American expatriate. She lives in Logan, Utah and loves nature, adventures, people, and animals, especially her family, friends, and cat. Niyonta is a 4th year PhD student in Psychology, an Inclusive Excellence Fellow for the School of Graduate Studies, the representative for the College of Education on the Graduate Student Council, and the Social Action Chair for the Graduate Students of Color Association. Her research and activism center elevating the stories of multiply minoritized individuals like herself and those with fewer privileges than herself. She is a strong advocate of thriving and improving the mental health and wellbeing of communities through policy upgrades, art, music, poetry, and revolutionary self-love.
Brook Hutchinson
Brook Hutchinson (she/they) is a 2nd-year master’s student in the sociology and anthropology department, under the advisement of Dr. Christy Glass. Her research interest is in social inequality, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. Currently, their thesis research focuses on sexuality binaries and how they impact the lives of those with marginalized identities. Additionally, her research seeks to expand the methodological definitions used in studying bi+ communities.
Prasina Parameswaran
Prasina Parameswaran is a second year PhD student at ITLS(Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences) department. Before joining USU, Prasina was a middle and high school science teacher in India. She actively worked with adolescents for their overall growth and development. Her research interests include intersections, gender and education sector(K-12 & higher ed.) which also comprises of gender achievement gap. She is also the Vice President(PhD program) at ITSA (Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences) at the ITLS department.
Mufti Nadimul Quamar Ahmed
Mufti Nadimul Quamar Ahmed is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His research interests include climate change perception, social impacts of climate change and natural disasters, gender dimensions in coping and adaptation strategies, environmental dimensions of fertility, etc. Mufti is from Bangladesh and has completed his BSS and MSS degrees, both majoring in Sociology, from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh. Mufti has some publications appeared in renowned journals like Environment, Development, and Sustainability (Springer), PlosOne, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment(Springer), Arabian Journal of Geosciences(Springer),Earth Systems and Environment (Springer), SN Social Science (Springer), Frontier's in Climate (Frontiers), etc.
Emily Slater
Emily Slater is from Mission, BC, a town an hour East of Vancouver, and she has fond memories growing up on acreage there. She lived in her home-province studying a Bachelor of Sociology, and Master of Public Administration. She continues to be inspired by learning from the diverse people in her life, and as a doctoral student in Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences.
She takes a compassionate, community-building approach as a graduate research assistant, instructor, and student council president for ITLS. As a fellow, she will contribute to an inclusive and safe culture, and conduct research that promotes equity at USU and the surrounding area
Research Fellows
Dr. Rebecca Bayeck
Dr. Rebecca Y. Bayeck is an Assistant professor in instructional Technology and Learning Sciences. Her research interests lie at the intersection of learning sciences, educational technology, literacy studies, and the interdisciplinary field of game studies. Within this intersection, she investigates games (digital & analog), learning and literacies, and online learning environments using a cultural lens. She holds a dual-Ph. D in Learning Design and Technology and Comparative International Education from the Pennsylvania State University. She recently worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.
Dr. Aryn M. Dotterer
Dr. Aryn M. Dotterer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Utah State University. Dr. Dotterer earned her Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. As a first-generation college student from a multi-ethnic family, Dr. Dotterer has devoted her scholarly and service activities to improving educational access and success among marginalized youth and their families. Dr. Dotterer’s research explores individual, family, and school factors related to children/adolescent’s adjustment, with a focus on underrepresented students. As a research fellow, Dr. Dotterer will examine variations in adolescents’ experiences of discrimination using Latent Class Analysis and test whether protective factors differ across subgroups of adolescents.
Dr. Amanda Lee
Amanda Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist with a background in printmaking, book arts, and photography. Her images and installations evoke a sense of poetic minimalism inspired by sacred texts, transcendentalist paintings, and manuscripts. She makes art that investigates the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems with print media and book art theory.
Lee earned an MFA at Indiana University, Bloomington and was the recipient of the inaugural Virginia A. Myers, Visiting Artist / Visiting Assistant Professorship in Printmaking at University of Iowa. She has presented work internationally in Scotland, Hong Kong, and has had several solo exhibitions at SG Gallery in Venice, Italy. Lee was an artist in residence for McColl Center for Art + Innovation and University of North Carolina, Charlotte, as well as Willapa Bay AIR, and a University of Washington, Whiteley Center Scholar.
Dr. Guadalupe Marquez-Velarde
Dr. Guadalupe Marquez-Velarde is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Sociology at Utah State University. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Texas A&M University in 2018 where she specialized in the study of population and health disparities. In her research, she evaluates how intersectionality, distinct systems of inequality working in tandem, influences population health. In 2021, Dr. Marquez-Velarde was awarded the Career Enhancement Fellowship (CEF) by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation). Her work has been published in peer-reviewed outlets including Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Social Science and Medicine, SSM-Population Health, and American Behavioral Scientist.
Dr. Diana Meter
Diana Meter earned her BA in Psychology from the University of North Carolina Asheville. She then earned her MS and PhD from the University of Arizona, where she was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She received postdoctoral training at the University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Meter’s work focuses on the effects of peer victimization and, more recently, sigma-based peer victimization, and is completed with the goal of better understanding the circumstances and processes that can help young people develop to their full potential, or the factors that can buffer barriers and challenges to help children and adolescents flourish. Her research has direct implications for teachers, parents, and policy, with the goal of improving conditions for child and adolescent development in interpersonal, family, and institutional contexts.
Dr. Ha Nguyen
Dr. Nguyen’s research integrates learning sciences, learning analytics, and human-centered design to promote deeper learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) contexts for diverse learners. Her research explores how to give students the opportunity to collaborate and reflect on their learning through two strands:
She employs user-centered, participatory approaches with students, educators, and community members to develop systems that provide adaptive, formative feedback to enrich classroom discourse and student understanding.
She applies learning analytics to understand how to foster student-driven discussion and learning regulation. She uses a range of methodologies, including text mining, process mining, social network analysis, and epistemic network analysis.
Dr. Sydney O'Shay
Sydney O’Shay is an assistant professor of communication studies (PhD, Wayne State University, 2021). Her research focuses on the construction of stigma communication in healthcare and family contexts. She is currently working on a project investigating stigma communication in interactions between nurses and their patients, and among nurses and other healthcare workers in the emergency department. Sydney is also currently investigating the stigma management and support experiences of family members who have a loved one with an opioid use disorder. Her work has been recognized with the Inclusive Scholarship Award (2022) from the Health Communication Interest Group of the Central States Communication Association and has been published in journals such as Health Communication, the Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication, Communication Studies, and New Media & Society, among others.
Teaching Fellows
Dr. Sara Bakker
As a Teaching Fellow, Dr. Bakker will redesign a Music Theory II course. The course will prepare music majors for an inclusive and stylistically broad future by curating diverse teaching examples and by updating the central concepts taught in that course. The course materials will include variety of musical styles, including jazz, popular, folk, religious, and classical, and composed or performed by minoritized musicians, including women, people of color, and indigenous peoples. Students enrolled in this course will receive instruction that is intersectional and inclusive to foster a climate of equality across gender and race lines in the Music Department by highlighting music by women and musicians of color.
Dr. Felipe Valencia
As a Teaching Fellow, Dr. Felipe Valencia will revise the course SPAN 3600, Survey of Spanish Literature I, to highlight other forms of voice and cultural agency available to medieval and early modern women. The course materials will also focus on texts that represent the female such as the bawdy fourteenth-century tales of the Libro de Buen Amor or seventeenth-century comedies like La dama boba by Lope de Vega and El vergonzoso en palacio by Tirso de Molina, or texts influenced by cultural practices or spaces dominated by women, such as fifteenth- and sixteenth-century folk lyrics and the sixteenth-century poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega. Dr. Valencia will also develop SPAN 4900, The Possibilities and Limits of Sex and Gender in the Early Modern Hispanic World.