Our Team

In addition to Envisioning Rural Futures, Daniel is co-Principal Investigator(PI) on the Visualizing Funds of Identity project, where his team investigates the role of identity in network visualization in middle school students, with most of their focus on rural Alabama. He also served as a co-PI on a Building Evidence to Increase Rural Learner Success grant that examined differences in career upskilling pathways among early childhood educators in rural Tennessee. Additionally, he has lived experience in rural communities, spending his childhood in rural Arkansas. He holds an Ed.D. in Adult & Lifelong Learning from the University of Arkansas, and an M.S. in Information Science from City St. George’s, University of London.

Judi is a nationally recognized expert on communities and bridging the gap between research and practice. Throughout her career, she has developed expansive learning communities. She is the Principal Investigator(PI) of the Hearing Each Other’s Voices project, which is developing a bidirectional model for professional learning for STEM coaches and researchers. Also, for the last decade, she has worked with NSF-funded researchers, fostered community between researchers and educators, included practitioners in the conversation on emerging technologies, and organized interactive convenings through NSF resource center work for the Center for Innovative Research on Cyberlearning and the Center for Integrative Research on Computing and Learning Sciences (CIRCLS).

Emi specializes in culturally responsive curriculum and assessment. She is the principal investigator for a long-term rural research-practice partnership to create computing pathways in Central Appalachia that honor Appalachian ingenuity, with experience facilitating dialogue across differences.

Linette is a former chemistry professor and grades 6–12 STEM educator whose work centers on collaborative design to bridge research and practice. She studies how professional learning experiences are designed and implemented, and how these designs shape the translation of evidence-based ideas into everyday classroom teaching. Her work focuses on identifying conditions that help practitioners transform research-informed knowledge into practical, adoptable tools and strategies for real-world classrooms.