July 2025
Seven graduate students were awarded the AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship in Education Research for 2025–26 and travel funding to present their research at the next AERA Annual Meeting. AERA’s Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program in Education Research aims to enhance and expand participation of scholars from racial and ethnic groups who historically have been underrepresented in faculty, research, and other scholarly positions across the education research field. The Minority Dissertation Fellowship Selection Committee chose these graduate students through a highly competitive review process.
The awardees are in the final stages of their dissertation research and writing across a broad range of education research topics, such as racial identity at HBCUs, university partnerships with Indigenous communities, and pre-K–12 school choice processes. These scholars rely on multiple data collection and analytic techniques in their research, including quantitative and qualitative methods as well as archival and community-engaged techniques. The awardees conceptualize their research around a range of disciplines and subfields across education research, including higher education, history of education, psychology, and sociology.
Minority Dissertation Fellows and Travel Awardees, 2025–2026
Name
Institution
Dissertation Title
Vania Blaiklock
College of William & Mary
Reading Rights: The History and Tradition of Black Literacy
Isaac Felix
University of California, Berkeley
Ecologías Transfronterizas: Transfronterizx Youth Movements and the Development of Border-Crossing Repertoires
Alexus Laster
Howard University
The Black Student Parent Experience: Exploring Student Parent Servingness at an Exemplar HBCU
Pharren Miller
University of California, Los Angeles
Chaotic Spaces: How Carcerality in Schools Persists in an “Abolitionist” Context
Carolyn Rodriguez
Future Indigenous Scientists: Tribal-University Partnerships for Building Amah Mutsun Science Curriculum
Tre Wells
Northwestern University
HBCU Marching Bands: Contexts for Racial Identity Development and Belonging
De’Ja Wood
Vanderbilt University
In Spite of and Against an Anti-Black Racist Schooling Landscape: Racialized Risk Assessments in Black Families’ Educational Decision Making
The program awards dissertation fellows a $25,000 stipend to complete their dissertation research and training. Travel awardees receive funds to attend the 2026 AERA Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. All awardees will present their work in an invited poster session, “Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research,” during the meeting, where they will meet with the Minority Dissertation Fellowship Selection Committee and other senior scholars as part of a mentoring and career development workshop.
Recent fellows are developing and implementing their research agendas in postdoctoral and assistant professor roles at prominent institutions, including the University of Florida, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt University. They are also publishing their research in peer reviewed journals, developing policy reports from their research, and contributing to edited research collections.
AERA Council established the Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program in Education Research in 1991 to support outstanding graduate students as they develop their research and begin their careers. AERA and its leadership are committed to providing a program of capacity-building and training opportunities for scholars from racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in education research.
“These fellows’ dissertation research shows amazing promise to provide rigorous scientific evidence on current and developing education topics and issues.” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine. “AERA is pleased to support this program and to develop the next generation of researchers and scientists studying education.”
AERA’s Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program funds scientific research on topics across education, schools and schooling processes, and student experiences. The selection committee seeks proposals to bring grounded, insightful, and informed perspectives to the field. AERA will begin accepting the next cycle of proposals later this summer, with an application deadline of November 10, 2025. For further details about the program, please email fellowships@aera.net.