Professor receives Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to grow new generation of learning engineers

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded Assistant Professor Nia Dowell a two-year, $999,000 research grant – “Learning Engineering, Post-Doctoral Fellowship” – to grow a new generation of learning engineers.

The grant will support a research team from UCI, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon University in their recruiting of postdoctoral fellows who are Black, Latino, and/or impacted by poverty. Fellows will work across multiple disciplines – including data science, learning science, education - to bring together stakeholders from K-12 schools, universities, and industry to engage in inclusion and equity-based research projects.
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“Education currently lacks diverse talent within R&D talent pools, which we believe is required to generate step change improvements in critical student learning outcomes,” Dowell said. ​“This project fits perfectly with our research mission to create more inclusive educational technology interactions for students. Ideally, these efforts will result in broader participation and increased retention for underrepresented populations in STEM.”

Nia Dowell, Assistant Professor

Dowell’s research foci include learning analytics, computer-mediated collaborative interaction, and computational linguistics. She is the director of the School of Education’s LA-Lab, which includes researchers with backgrounds in cognitive science, information, psychology, and statistics. The lab takes a multi-disciplinary approach that builds on theories and methods in the learning sciences, cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, and computational social sciences. The team has recently started to explore issues around inclusivity and equity in online STEM collaborative interactions.

“The learning engineers post-doctoral fellows will work on a project that is focused on improving learning outcomes for students who are under-represented in STEM,” Dowell said. “In particular, the fellow will engage in the next stage of this research, which will use artificial intelligence approaches to provide real-time, personalized feedback to students to mitigate these issues.”