Pérez awarded 2025 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship

By Celine Gomes

Greses Pérez, McDonnell Family Assistant Professor of Engineering Education in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Fellow at Tufts University’s Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO), has been selected as the  2025 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. This fellowship will support her ongoing work on how multilingual and multidialectal communities learn and apply engineering in ways that reflect their lived experiences and cultural understandings.

Pérez’s current project, Thriving in Fogaraté: Engineering Ingenuity in Haitian-Dominican Communities, investigates how engineering and robotics knowledge is shaped by the everyday experiences, language, and cultural traditions of Haitian-Dominican communities. Her research involves partnering with communities in Dominican Republic’s former bateyes—under-resourced sugar plantation towns that are primarily home to descendants of Haitian and Dominican sugarcane workers—and reimagines bateyes as powerful learning environments. Pérez highlights how the bateyes “have cultivated a culture of engineering ingenuity by integrating technical knowledge with community practices across generations.” 

Pérez’s work draws from learning sciences and applied linguistics to re-imagine how engineering and robotics education can expand who is heard and valued in engineering and science—especially individuals who navigate across languages, cultures, and communities. Through mixed methods research approaches, Pérez uncovers how local knowledge, and multilingual/multidialectal practices support engineering problem-solving and social transformation. Ultimately, her research offers new insights for designing an engineering education that trains students to solve problems elegantly through community-driven knowledge and practices.

This year, only 25 fellows were selected from a highly competitive pool of over 270 applications. The fellowships are administered by the National Academy of Education (NAEd), an honorary society that promotes high-quality research to improve education policy and practice, and funded by the Spencer Foundation. The NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship is a highly prestigious award for early career education researchers. Supported by the Spencer Foundation, the fellowship provides funding, professional development, and mentorship from senior scholars to help fellows advance their research and careers. The program plays a key role in shaping the future of education research across disciplines with over 800 alumni to date.

Greses Pérez is the McDonnell Family Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Tufts University in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with secondary appointments in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Education. An engineer and learning scientist, her research explores how language practices and cultural understandings shape engineering learning, problem-solving, and technology design—especially among multilingual and multicultural communities. She investigates how community life informs complex engineering decisions and how multilingual audiences shape students’ understanding and design of technologies.

Learn more about McDonnell Family Assistant Professor Greses Pérez.