PhD Students
Imani Dixon
Ph.D. Student in Human Development & Psychology, UCLA SE&IS
Masters of Arts in Human Development & Psychology, UCLA SE&IS
Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, St. John’s University
My research interests include educational equity, culturally responsive pedagogy, and developing effective intervention programs to assist marginalized communities in promoting academic liberation. I was inspired to pursue this area of research due to my previous experience as a school teacher in Los Angeles. I wanted to provide significant assistance not only to teachers and school professionals, but also to students and their families, addressing needs that extend beyond the classroom curriculum.
Juno Yingzhi Dong
Ph.D. student in Education – Human Development & Psychology
M.A. in Humanities (Linguistics), University of Chicago, 2019
B.A. in Global Studies and French, Colby College, 2018
My research interests include teachers’ language practices, demographic characteristics, beliefs and ideologies, and self-efficacy. I am passionate about conducting research that supports culturally and linguistically diverse students and educators.
Han Lee
Joint Doc Ph.D student in Special Education – Human Development & Psychology
M.S in Special Education – CSU East Bay
M.A in Educational Psychology – Pepperdine University
My research interests focus on addressing the disproportionate rates of English Learners in special education by examining the inaccuracy of current identification processes of the educational system. My own teaching experiences with culturally and linguistically diverse students with disabilities have been instrumental in shaping my hopes to support future special education teachers through fieldwork and research.
Ines Torres
Ph.D. Student in Human Developmet and Psychology, School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA
M.A. Child Development, CSULA
B.A. Child Development, CSULA
My research interests include the effects of language brokering, bilingualism/multilingualism, and language acquisition. My experience as a preschool teacher made me wonder how teachers play a role in language acquisition and how prepared teachers are to help support bilingual/multilingual children. Additionally, my child life volunteer experience made me interested in how children’s language brokering in medical settings is perceived by medical staff and what might be the long-term outcomes of language brokering.
Yifei Wang (Phoebe)
Ph.D. student in Human Development and Psychology, School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA
M.S.Ed. in Learning Sciences and Technologies, University of Pennsylvania
B.Econ. in Finance & B.A. in English, Beijing Foreign Studies University
I am a Ph.D. student from the Department of Edcuation at UCLA. My current research explores Mandarin-English bilingual children’s language interaction and its relationship with langauge proficiency. I’m also interested in language assessment, sociolinguistics and language variation, first and second language acquisition.
Edwin Zamora
Doctoral Student in Human Development and Psychology
B.A. Psychology, UCLA
My interest in the language and literacy outcomes of multilingual children stems from my experience as Sequential bilingual (Spanish) who went through ELD during my early schooling. As an undergraduate, I encountered the literature on the ‘bilingual advantage’ and immersed myself in research shortly after. I was propelled into the field as McNair Scholar and quickly became invested in generating studies with an asset-based perspective of heritage languages.
Xizi (Sue) Zhang
Ph.D. student in Human Development and Psychology, School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA
Ed.M. in Human Development and Psychology, Harvard University, 2020
M.A. in Learning Sciences, Northwestern University, 2018
B.A. in Elementary Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2017
My research focuses on the language and literacy development of bilingual and multilingual learners. This interest began through my experience working with ESL students in Ann Arbor public schools and teaching EFL learners in China. Currently, I explore cross-linguistic transfer and code-switching in bilingual first language acquisition children. I also have a background in academic language research, having worked as a research assistant at both Harvard and Fudan University, where I studied how adolescent EFL students write in English across different communicative contexts.