Research Team
Vanderbilt University
Ilana Horn is Wachtmeister Family Chair of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University Peabody College, Director of the Teacher Learning Lab, and Principal Investigator of Project TAU. Using sociolinguistics and interpretive methods, her work examines secondary mathematics teachers’ learning in the contexts of their workplace. Her research aims to critique and improve teacher education, and, in turn, improve education for students and supports for teachers, particularly in urban schools. She has published her research in top journals including Journal of the Learning Sciences, American Educational Research Journal, Educational Psychologist, Journal for Teacher Education and Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, and she has published two books for teachers, Strength in Numbers (2012, NCTM) and Motivated (2017, Heinemann). Her most recent monograph, Teacher Learning of Ambitious and Equitable Mathematics Instruction (co-authored with Brette Garner) reports the findings from Project SIGMa.
Lizi Metts is a Ph.D. Candidate at Vanderbilt University Peabody College and a research assistant on Project TAU. Her research interests broadly revolve around mathematics education, data and statistics literacy, issues of equity and social justice, and teacher learning. Prior to graduate school, she was a high school math teacher in Tennessee for eight years. Returning to graduate studies at Vanderbilt, she is interested in exploring teacher learning around ambitious and equitable pedagogies and the teaching and learning of statistics, modeling, and data science drawing on socio-cultural, situative, and critical perspectives.
Karen Underwood is a third year Ph.D student at Vanderbilt University Peabody College and a research assistant on Project TAU. Prior to starting this doctoral program, Karen was an elementary school teacher, mentor and instructional coach in San Diego, California for 7 years. Broadly, Karen is interested in mathematics education, teacher learning and how ideology intersects with learning. In her free time, Karen loves to play tennis, read s and spend time with the people she loves!
Shuqin Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at Hunan Normal University. She joined TAU in the 2023 fall as a visiting doctoral student. She holds a BSc and an MEd. Previously, she was a mathematics teacher at a middle school in rural China, which strengthened her commitment to supporting teacher development, especially among underrepresented teachers. Her research focuses on teacher emotion, teacher education, and evidence-based teaching. Her doctoral dissertation investigates the emotional labor of teachers, emphasizing the need to alleviate teachers’ emotional stress and enhance well-being through supportive institutions and empowering teacher education practices. Additionally, her earlier work has provided high-quality evidence for technology-enhanced teaching practices. Her work has been published in the Review of Educational Research, Journal of Assisted Computer Learning, and Text and Performance Quarterly. She collaborates with the TAU team to explore the complexity of emotions in the teacher learning community.
University of Denver
Brette Garner is an associate professor of mathematics education at the University of Denver’s Morgridge College of Education. She researches mathematics teacher learning, with a particular emphasis on how social and political contexts influence teachers’ work. As a former middle-school mathematics teacher, Brette recognizes teacher learning as an important lever for improving educational experiences for students — especially those who are at risk of being denied access to high-quality mathematics.
Christine Hood is a Senior Instructional Designer and Educational Technologist for the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver (DU). She earned her Ph.D. at Morgridge College of Education in Curriculum and Instruction, specializing in math education, at DU. She is a postdoctoral researcher for TAU. Her research interests involve preservice teachers’ math belief formation, rehumanizing math teacher education, and instructional design. Christine previously taught middle school math for three years. She loves to play volleyball, watch TV, climb, thrift, and snuggle her dog, Nakia. Most importantly, she has a lifelong obsession with The Chicago White Sox.
Alyssa Williams is a Curriculum and Instruction doctoral student at the University of Denver and a TAU research assistant. Her research interests involve understanding and improving teacher training efforts across all levels of education but especially in relation to undergraduate math professors’ pedagogical development. Alyssa previously taught middle school math. She enjoys baking, running, and spending time with her husband Ben and baby boy, Owen.
Tara Crampton (she/they) is a Curriculum and Instruction 
PhD student at the University of Denver (DU) and a TAU research assistant. Her research focus is exploring how higher education professors that do not attend a teaching program learn how to teach. They also work full-time as an Academic Services Associate for the Counseling Psychology department at DU and they adjunct for the Accounting department at the Community College of Denver. Tara’s hobbies include playing Dungeons and Dragons, playing Nintendo Switch games, and reading fantasy books.
Georgia State University
Sierra Gilliam is currently a Ph.D. student in the department of Learning Sciences at Georgia State University. Previously, she was a computer science teacher and founded the first drone technology program for Guilford County Public Schools in Greensboro, NC. She received her B.S. in Environmental Science and M.S. in Earth Science from North Carolina Central University. She reigns from our nation’s capital Washington, DC and is extremely passionate about computer science and expanding access to computer science to youth and adults, particularly those living and working in historically underserved communities like the ones she grew up and has worked in. Her research interests are in computer science education with a particular focus on using Interaction Geography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to develop and study new teaching practices that support and broaden access to computer science learning and teaching. She hopes to teach, mentor, and continue to be a service to young intellectuals, guide them to delve deeper into complex computational learning strategies, and help them to find their voice and purpose.
Ben Rydal Shapiro is an assistant professor in the Department of Learning Sciences. His research and design integrate approaches from the learning sciences, information visualization and computer science to study how people engage and learn in relation to the physical environment and to develop new types of learning environments and experiences that support computer and data science education. Current research projects include the design, development and evaluation of new technologies and learning environments that a) leverage learner’s relationships to data to support learning, b) promote pathways to data literacy and engagement with civic data, c) support teaching technology ethics and specifically data ethics and d) advance teacher’s reflective professional practice to interpret data about classroom interaction.
Shapiro was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute for Technology. He completed his Ph.D. in learning sciences as a member of the Space, Learning & Mobility Lab at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education. To learn more about his work visit: https://www.benrydal.com.
Harvey Mudd College
Darryl Yong is the McGregor-Girand Chair in STEM Equity Innovation and Research and a Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and currently serves as its Core Curriculum Director and Associate Dean for Special projects. He was the Founding Director of the Claremont Colleges Center for Teaching and Learning and received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the University of Washington. His scholarly activities focus on the retention and professional development of secondary school mathematics teachers and improving undergraduate mathematics education. He is passionate about broadening participation in STEM and helping institutions build capacity for increasing diversity and inclusion. Darryl serves on the Steering Committee for Math for America Los Angeles and helps to design professional development for its Fellows. From 2007-2024, he was also an instructor for the Secondary School Teacher Program at IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute.
Additional Collaboration
Dr. Lara Jasien is an educational researcher at CPM Educational Program with scholarly interests in mathematics learning and instruction, particularly in contexts that foster enjoyment in mathematical sense-making. Her work is grounded in collaborative relationships with designers inside and outside of school contexts. Outside of school, Jasien collaborates with learning environment designers to study families’ mathematical play. Inside of school, Jasien collaborates with designers including curriculum writers, professional learning workshop specialists, coaches, and teachers to study instruction that supports student exploration and inquiry, which she sees as reflexively related to teachers’ own intellectual thriving. Both inside and outside of school, she is particularly interested in studying designs that honor both adults’ and children’s intellectual dignity, and she posits that fostering aesthetically guided mathematical problem-posing is critical to such designs. She has published her research in top journals including the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education and the Journal of the Learning Sciences.
Alumni
Nadav Ehrenfeld is a postdoctoral research fellow at Vanderbilt University Peabody College. He is interested in questions of how to support math teachers’ professional development in a way that focuses on their experiences, interests, concerns, and sensemaking, as well as how to support math students’ learning in ways that are both humanizing and cognitively-ambitious. Theoretically, his work builds on sociocultural, ecological, and complexity theories of learning to explore these questions from teachers’ and students’ learning-ecology perspectives. Prior to completing his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University, Nadav taught math in pre-college and college programs in Israel. He holds a BSc in Mathematics & Computer Science and an MSc in Mathematics, with a focus on math education, both from Ben Gurion University. His work on math teaching and teacher learning has been published in journals such as Educational Researcher, Educational Studies in Mathematics, and International Journal of Educational Research.
Katherine Schneeberger McGugan is a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University Peabody College and a research assistant on Project TAU. Her research focuses on ongoing mathematics teacher learning with a focus on experienced teachers. Prior to her time at Vanderbilt, she worked as a middle school math teacher and mathematics coach in Massachusetts, roles that fostered a deep commitment to supporting teachers throughout their careers. Driven by sociocultural and situative perspectives, Her work is informed by education policy and sociology as she explores institutional logics of and teachers’ ethical commitments to good teaching.
Yeliz Günal-Aggül is a Ph.D. candidate in Learning Sciences at Bogazici University in Turkey. During the 2022-2023 academic year, she joined the TAU team as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. After completing the Fulbright program, she continued to be a part of the team as a doctoral student intern. Prior to embarking on her doctoral studies, Yeliz obtained a master’s degree in sociology and gained eight years of experience as a mathematics teacher. In her dissertation, she conducts a research-practice partnership project to support a group of mathematics teachers in building their professional learning community under a non-profit in Turkey. She examines how teachers achieve expansive and transformative forms of learning and enact agency in the community building process. Intersecting TAU and her research, she collaborates with the TAU team to investigate designing participatory teacher professional learning environments.