Nicola Law is a Doctoral Candidate in the Instructional Technology & Media program. Prior to becoming a student at TC, Nicola earned her Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies from Pennsylvania State University, and both her Master of Arts in Communication & Education and a Master of Science in Applied Statistics from Teachers College. Nicola is a learning scientist whose research is broadly focused on humanistic approaches to technology and how it can help to solve human problems.

Nicola has always been interested in technology and engineering. As a kid, she enjoyed playing with model cars and other gadgets. However, she specifically recalls being told by a physics teacher in middle school that girls would not be good at science or technology: “He literally said very loudly to the class that girls would not be good at things like physics when they go off to college.” Though she remained discouraged by this throughout her adolescence, a very supportive college professor helped Nicola to see that the work she was doing as an undergraduate student in media studies could be broadened to explore the technologies that facilitate human interaction with media as well. 

With this new perspective, Nicola chose to pursue her masters degree at TC. Here, she began to focus on how different technologies can support learning, developing an interest in human-computer and human-robot interaction. Nicola works hard to center student needs in this work, as she believes people should be “at the heart of how we always approach technology.” Her research highlights how tech can be designed to foster inclusion, engagement, and meaningful learning experiences.

In addition to developing educational technologies herself, Nicola also became interested in how identity plays a role in STEM education and professional experiences. As someone who grew up between cultures, Nicola’s dissertation research is both an exploration of her own identities and the identities of other women in STEM, helping to uncover how we can all be empowered by our own stories and experiences. Under the supervision of Professor Sandra Okita, Nicola studies how undergraduate women in engineering use visual storytelling to share their experiences. She uses visual methodologies to provide her participants with the opportunity to reflect on their experiences, paying particular attention to how these methods reveal how different aspects of their identities have shaped their work in ways that traditional interviews might not. Intersectionality —the ways social categorizations such as race, class, gender, citizenship, and other identities interconnect to shape our lived experiences— is key to her work. It has helped Nicola to more deeply understand her participants’ stories and her own. 

In addition to her dissertation work, Nicola is also a part of the Gizmo EdTech Lab. Gizmo EdTech Lab examines how innovative technologies (i.e., humanoid robots, robotic systems, games for learning, pedagogical agents/avatars, virtual and mixed reality environments) can prepare students for future learning, facilitate peer learning, design relationships that act as a threshold to learning, instruction, and assessment in the STEAM and biological science subject areas. Here, Nicola has been working on a project which explores robotics within educational contexts, particularly as companion tutors. 

As Nicola prepares to defend her dissertation, she is already looking forward to how her current work will expand in the future. She hopes to scale of her dissertation project, offering visual storytelling as a powerful tool for a broader audience of women in STEM fields to find empowerment through their own narratives. Nicola has found that, in general, people tend to minimize how far they have come. Whether it is full of successes or failures, reflecting on our pasts can help us to see how much work we have done to get us to where we are today. This can be particularly important for women in STEM, as they have often persevered through many obstacles as they pursue careers in male-dominated fields. We in the MST department find Nicola’s work deeply inspiring, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for her!