Faculty News

Sigal Ben-Porath has been named the 2026 recipient of the Penn Alumni Faculty Award of Merit and will be honored at a gala on Nov. 13.

Sade Bonilla was selected as a Summer Scholar for the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center’s 2026 fellowship program. Her article, “Cultural Relevance at Scale: The Effects of an Ethnic Studies Expansion on Academic Outcomes,” (co-authored with Biraj Bisht, Grace Kim, and Emily Penner) is available in The American Educational Research Journal. She was also awarded an Arnold Ventures grant for the project “Funding Pathways to Success: The Policy Impact of Tuition-Free Dual Enrollment on Attainment and Workforce Preparation” with Daniel Sparks and Monnica Chan.

Ed Brockenbrough was awarded a Spencer Foundation Racial Equity Research Grant for his study, “Online Content as Sexuality Education Curricula for LGBTQ+ Youth of Color,” which explores the online sexuality education experiences of LGBTQ+ youth of color. He also recently appeared on the Teach the Babies podcast, where he talked about queerly responsive pedagogy and sex education, and the Ratchet Roundtable podcast, where he talked about Black queerness, safe spaces, and a pedagogy of the closet.

H. Gerald Campano was selected for the new class of American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellows, honoring his exceptional contributions to, and excellence in, education research. He won the AERA Luis Moll Creative Work/Book Award, Division G, with María Paula Ghiso, GRD’09, for Methods for Community-Based Research. And he also released with his co-authors a policy brief, “Research-Practice Partnerships for Social Transformation: Democratizing Inquiry and Prefiguring More Just Scholarly Relations.”

MarÍa Cioè-Peña launched Racial Justice in Multilingual Education (RJME), an open-access, interdisciplinary journal, in collaboration with Penn Libraries. She also published “Ableism, Gentrification, and the Exclusion of Multilingual Learners with Disabilities from Bilingual Education Programs” in the Bilingual Research Journal; “Are we gentrifying? And if so, is that bad?” in RJME; and “Weathering the Storm” in Women and Therapy.

Amalia Daché was awarded a grant from the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation to develop a series of children’s books based on her research on Afro-Latin communities in Cuba and North Philadelphia. The first book of the series, Amor and the Magical River, will publish in August.

Andy Danilchick and Mike Nakkula were awarded $1 million in funding from two Public School Districts’ Opioid Recovery Trust three-year grants: $500,000 in partnership with the Chester-Upland School District and another $500,000 with the Red Clay Consolidated School District. The grants support membership in the Consortium for Mental Health and Optimal Development and the development of opioid and addiction toolkits for students, educators, and the community.

Nelson Flores was appointed to AERA’s minority fellowship selection committee.

Vivian Gadsden won both the 2026 AERA Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award and the inaugural Dr. Felice J. Levine Distinguished Contributions to Mentoring in Research and Leadership Award, celebrating her scholarship and commitment to developing future scholars. A symposium in her honor, “Imagining and Securing Better Futures for Children and Families,” was held at Penn GSE in May.

Zachary Herrmann was invited to deliver the keynote at the Princeton Day School Environmental Action Club Symposium and to present on the Penn Leadership Education Institute at the Association for Moral Education in Madrid.

Seiji Isotani was chosen as a recipient of the 2026 Discovering the Future of AI awards from Penn AI for his Penn AI Pedagogy Initiative, a new University-wide project designed to support responsible and effective use of AI in teaching and learning by directly involving faculty and students in the design and testing of AI-enhanced educational practices.

Charlotte Jacobs received the Impact Award from Christina Seix Academy in recognition of her 10 years of service to the school as a consultant and board member. She also published an article, “Truth Telling and Imagining: An Intersectional Vision of Girls’ Activism,” co-written with members of the Girls Justice League, that appeared in the spring issue of Girlhood Studies.

Yasmin Kafai received the 2025 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for developing Scratch, an online coding community that now has over 140 million users and 1 billion posted projects.

Leland McGee published two articles, “Why Unlearning is an Important Skill for Today’s Learners” in India Today and “Bridging Indigenous Knowledge and Modern Education: A Roadmap for the NEP Era” in The Economic Times. He also developed an event for AI Month at Penn on “Global Human Agency in the Era of AI.”

Laura Perna gave a presentation, “Transparency in Cost and Access,” for Association of American Universities (AAU) presidents at the AAU Summit on Research Universities and the Public Good. Both she and Rachel Baker are part of the Access, Affordability, and Value working group for Penn Forward.

Abby Reisman launched the website for her DISCUSS project (discussphilly.org), a Penn GSE and Temple University collaboration on how social studies teachers grow as discussion facilitators. The website features resources for teachers, leaders, and teacher educators.

Betsy Rymes gave a featured session, “Real World Linguistics: Seven Ways of Exploring Language with Your (Inevitably) Multilingual Students,” for the Pennsylvania Department of Education English Language Development Professional Learning Conference and an invited talk, “Real World Language,” at Duke University as part of their initiative Community Partnerships and Pedagogies of Racial Justice: Identifying, Understanding and Challenging Raciolinguistic Practices in the Duke and Durham Communities. She also published a review of the book Gibraltarians and Their Language: 22 Linguistic Biographies in English Language and Linguistics.

Katharine O. Strunk was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Education, widely recognized as one of the highest honors in the field of education research.

Karen Weaver was invited to co-lead a discussion on “Navigating the New Athletics Landscape: Strategic Challenges Across NCAA Divisions” during the AGB’s Advancing Board Excellence National Conference on Trusteeship.

Julie Wollman published “A Quantitative Ethnography on Leadership Values and Principles of Asian American Women Senior Leaders in Higher Education” with Catherine L. Zhang and Xiaotong Jenna Lu in Advances in Quantitative Ethnography.

Jenny Zapf led a panel on innovating higher education and served as a grand jury judge at the Reimagine Education global education awards and conference in London. She was also invited to serve as chair of the board of advisors for the newly launched alumni China EdTech Leadership Network.

Jonathan Zimmerman spoke on behalf of academic freedom and free speech at the New College of Florida, and he spoke at Purdue University about the history of college teaching and efforts to create required core classes at Penn and elsewhere.