Starting in 1968 and later expanding to a full 30-day celebration in 1988, National Hispanic Heritage Month sets aside September 15 through October 15 to specifically recognize the contributions of Hispanic Americans to the history, culture, and achievements of the United States.
At TERC, it gives us an opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments and contributions of Hispanic and Latinx TERC staff members, and the diversity they add to the STEM education community.
Click on each staff member's name to get even more information about their work and the many ways they are advancing their fields. You can also click here for a list of incredible resources from TERC staff that are available in Spanish and English.
Cinthia Colón, Researcher
Cinthia has many years of experience in Boston Public Schools as a full inclusion classroom teacher, ESL teacher, mentor, peer evaluator, and, currently, a middle school learning specialist. She works with the Investigations team on the equity and inclusion resources that are in development.
Sabrina De Los Santos, Researcher
Sabrina works on several STEM research and evaluation projects engaging middle school students in rural settings, Latino families with children in preschool, and preK-12 teachers.
Sabrina is the co-PI on Aprendiendo: Learning Math Talk with Spanish-Speaking Pre-K Families. This innovative research program addresses the digital divide by creating short, engaging videos modeling mathematic activities and sending them to families through a free mobile app.
Santiago Gasca, Researcher
Santi is the Project Manager for Innovate to Mitigate and works on a range of research and evaluation projects. He is especially interested in character development and resilience, particularly pertaining to youth STEM educational engagement and the re-engagement of students who leave school. Santi is also the chair of TERC’s Institutional Review Board (IRB).
Nuria Jaumot-Pascual, Research Scientist
Nuria researches the experiences in STEM education and careers of populations that live at the intersection of interlocking marginalities, with an emphasis on gender/sexual identity and race/ethnicity. She co-leads the Institute for Meta-Synthesis and specializes in qualitative, literature synthesis, and visual inquiry methods.
Jessica Karch, Research Scientist
Jessica is the PI of the new project, Exploring DataFest. She and her team will run the evaluation of a study of undergraduates learning about the interdisciplinary practice of data science through participation in the co-curricular weekend long DataFest event at several participating US colleges and universities.
Teresa Lara-Meloy, Senior Math Education Designer
Teresa is passionate about finding better ways of teaching middle school math and improving ways to support math teachers and coaches. Her interests include the multiple ways in which Emergent Multilinguals (EM, particularly Spanish-speaking ones) participate in mathematical discourse using dynamic representational technologies (DRT).
Her latest project, AMPD4MATH, uses a co-design framework to develop an equity-focused making program. AMPD4MATH relies on the life and values of Cesar Chavez as a touchstone for rural Latinx youth’s positive identity, engaging Latinx youth who live in the agricultural regions of the Southwest United States.
Audrey Martínez-Gudapakkam, Senior Researcher
Audrey is currently conducting an evaluation of the University of Texas El Paso's Transformational Change for Latinx Student Success project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The purpose of this grant is to increase the number of minoritized individuals in engineering and certain science fields (DEERS, CS, Physics) with a focus on Latinas. She is also the co-PI on Aprendiendo.
Jonathan Peña, IT Support Specialist
Jonathan lends his expertise to all TERC staff and collaborators, from providing a welcoming environment at the Help Desk to software and computer deployments.
Smirla Ramos Montañez, Family STEM Learning Researcher
Smirla is a bilingual (Spanish/English) and bicultural (Puerto Rican/American) researcher and evaluator focusing on culturally responsive studies related to informal STEM learning.
She is the PI on Diálogos, a new NSF-funded project in partnership with Oregon State University designed to engage parents as research partners in exploring the ways we can leverage informal family engineering activities to support the development of executive function skills for preschool-age children from Latinx families.
Christina Silva, Research Associate
Christina began her career in the TERC Scholars program, a research internship opportunity for undergraduate students of color. She currently works on five national-level funded projects, all of which are led by women and women of color, and are grounded in achieving STEM equity and inclusion.
Lisette Torres-Gerald, Senior Research Associate
Lisette is a trained scientist and disabled scholar-activist whose work focuses on addressing racial and gender inequity and disability in STEM and higher education. She is co-PI on the new Informal STEM Learning (ISL) Equity Resource Center funded by the NSF, expanding the knowledge of equity-oriented practices in ISL programming, research, and communication to help pursue AISL and other NSF funding.
Interns
Anya Carbonell
Anya works on Aprendiendo which supports Spanish speaking parents through learning pedagogy that will enable them to support preparing their children for learning math in kindergarten.
You can read about her experience as a TERC Scholar in Hands On!
