Four Marsal School PhD students awarded NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships

Marsal Family School of Education doctoral students Anna Almore, Jordan Berne, Annaliese Paulson, and Mez Perez are 2024 recipients of NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships. The NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards offered to doctoral students in service of completing the writing of their dissertation.

Almore, a doctoral candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education, is currently working on her dissertation, "Care in Containment: The Geography of Black and Indigenous Encounters within Schooling." 

Berne is a PhD student in economics at the University of Michigan and an Institute of Education Sciences predoctoral fellow. His dissertation "Public Pre-K Expansion in the Presence of Alternative Childcare Options," provides new evidence on a range of policy-relevant questions regarding public pre-K.

Paulson is a doctoral candidate in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education and an Institute for Education Sciences Causal Inference in Education Policy Research Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She provides one of the first quantitative analyses of the role of postsecondary general education requirements in the United States in her dissertation-in-progress, “General Education and Student Success.” 

Perez, an Educational Studies doctoral candidate in the Marsal Family School of Education and the School of Information, is currently working on her dissertation, "Crafting Futures: Designing for Youth and Community “Futuring” Practices."

The NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship encourages a new generation of scholars from a wide range of disciplines and professional fields to undertake research relevant to the improvement of education. This fellowship supports candidates whose dissertation projects bring innovative and insightful approaches to the history, theory, analysis, or application of formal and informal education.