Director of Innovation and Evaluation
& Co-Founder
(Curriculum Vitae)
Lauren is a Research Scholar with the College of Education at NC State and the Director of Innovation and Evaluation with the SMART Collaborative. Her main areas of investigation are culturalized, practice-relevant student motivation strategies and the social capital and dynamics of large and interdisciplinary teams, such as research-practice partnerships. On the SMART Collaborative, she works with Ph.D.s, graduate students, and undergraduate students to conduct research that will progress our context-specific understandings of student motivation while also giving students opportunities to develop as scholars through hands-on experiences. As Co-PI of the Developing Appropriate Strategies for Targeting Early Adolescents’ Motivation in STEM project, a three-year ITEST Strategies project, Lauren leads qualitative and quantitative analyses on changes in teachers’ beliefs and practices with regard to their use of culturally-sensitive motivationally supportive strategies. Before coming to NC State, she received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Virginia Tech, where she also received her Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees. Lauren lives in Raleigh with her husband and her dog. She enjoys walking, cooking, NC microbrews, and Golden Girls reruns.
