CAS Spring Research and Scholarship Symposium
The objective of this event is to bring together faculty from a diverse set of CAS disciplines for an afternoon to celebrate the research and scholarship in which we’re engaged. Our topic this semester will be Learning and we’ll hear from the following, talented CAS Faculty:
Gláucia V. Silva
Title: "Why research heritage languages: The case of Portuguese”
Gláucia Silva is a Professor in the Departments of Portuguese and Education at UMass Dartmouth. She specializes in heritage and foreign language learning, with a focus on Portuguese. Professor Silva has co-authored four Portuguese language textbooks and is the author of Word order in Brazilian Portuguese (De Gruyter, 2001/2013). She has also published several scholarly articles and book chapters, both in English and in Portuguese, besides a co-edited volume (Inclusiveness beyond the (non)binary in Romance languages: From research to classroom implementation, Routledge, 2024). Another co-edited volume on Portuguese as a heritage language will be published by Routledge in 2027. Her graduate advisees have investigated different aspects related to Portuguese language and linguistics, such as the roles of attitude and motivation in learning Portuguese, service encounters in Portuguese in Massachusetts, gay articulations of desire in Rio de Janeiro, the impact of anxiety on learning Portuguese, using songs in the foreign language classroom, task-based language teaching, mother-child interactions in a bilingual family, among others.
Donghui Yan
Title: "Learning with random projection forests”
Donghui Yan is an Associate Professor in the Mathematics Department whose research lies at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, data mining, and data science. He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley and has worked both in academic research and industry, applying statistical and machine learning methods to real-world problems in environment study and public health, with numerous high-impact publications in his field.
Shakhnoza Kayumova
Title: "Following Students Over Time, Results from Longitudinal Research: Learning as Identity Work in STEM Classrooms”
Dr. Kayumova is Professor of STEM Education and Teacher Development, Director at the Kaput Center for STEM Education Research and Innovation, and the founder of the STEAM Language, Learning, and Identity Research lab aimed at improving equitable outcomes in STEM Education. One of the main lines of Dr. Kayumova’s research inquiry is concerned with understanding how to make science education a more equitable space for young people from traditionally underserved communities through the design and study of teaching and learning ecologies embedded in cultural, linguistic, and epistemic heterogeneity. Issues of language, identity, and gender are recurrent themes in her research. Dr. Kayumova is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, as well as the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award. She has been a PI and Co-PI of multiple external grants, including NEH STEM and Humanities, which include NSF CS-for-all, STEM+C, NSF DRK-12, NSF Eager, to name few. Dr. Kayumova’s work appears in more than 45 peer-reviewed publications, over 100 conferences. Shakhnoza currently serves as associate editor for Journal of Science Teaching, and Science Education, premier research journals in the field of education, and her research work appears in journals such as Journal of Learning Sciences (JLS), Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Democracy and Education, and Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JARST), Science Education journal.
Call For Spring 2026 CAS Research & Scholarship Poster Abstracts:
For this event, the Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Sciences also invites Faculty and their students/advisees to submit abstracts describing any research/scholarship they would like to communicate with their colleagues at this event. The poster session will take place over refreshments, after we hear from our three plenary speakers, which will hopefully cultivate an informal, conversational atmosphere.
The medium of the presentation of work is flexible, but posters describing the research are suggested. Please submit a very brief (250-300 word) summary of the work you would like to present to me (pcappillino@umassd.edu).
Please submit abstracts by March 24, 2026.
Grand Reading Room
Patrick Cappillino
pcappillino@umassd.edu