Supriya K Email & Phone Number

I am a scientist and an educator working on centering social justice in science education and research, as well as improving scientific teaching and research by drawing upon and honoring a plurality of knowledge systems and cultural practices. I grew up in New Delhi, India and came to the U.S. to pursue a PhD in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. For my PhD, I studied competition between birds and ants for arthropod prey and nesting spaces in the eastern Himalaya. Over the course of my PhD, I became interested in inclusive pedagogy and the field of education research and went on to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the Biology Education Research lab at Arizona State University. As a postdoctoral researcher, I studied how assessments at the undergraduate level, particularly high-stakes exams, contribute to disparities in student grades by social identities and worked on a needs assessment of students in the online biology degree program. My research projects have involved many skills including survey design, designing studies/experiments, statistical data analysis including Rasch and multilevel modeling, scientific writing and writing IRB protocols, insect sampling, banding birds and next-generation DNA sequencing. I have also applied for and received many grants for my research. Moreover, I have facilitated many workshops on inclusive and anti-racist teaching. I also worked as the co-director for the Chicago chapter of Expanding your Horizons, a non-profit that organizes an annual STEM conference for middle-school girls for 3 years. Through my work with EYH Chicago, I gained a lot of experience in leading an organization, planning a large-scale event, facilitating communication and effective ways of STEM outreach.