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
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.