The Foundation is delighted to announce the newest class of William T. Grant Scholars:
- Tolani Britton, in the school of education at the University of California, Berkeley
- James Chu,in the department of sociology at Columbia University
- Thania Galvan, in the department of psychology at the University of Georgia
- Nikhil Garg, in the school of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University
- Lauren Magee, in the department of pediatrics at Indiana University
- Theresa Rocha Beardall, in the department of sociology at the University of Washington
- Ha Ngan (Milkie) Vu, in the department of preventive medicine at Northwestern University
Launched in 1982, the William T. Grant Scholars Program has supported the professional development of over 200 talented early-career researchers. Scholars receive $425,000 to execute rigorous five-year research plans that stretch their skills and knowledge into new disciplines, content areas, or methods. Recognizing that early-career researchers are rarely offered support to take measured risks in their work, the award also includes funding for training and mentorship from experts in areas pertinent to Scholars’ development. This year, we are pleased that the Bezos Family Foundation has joined us in supporting the Scholars awards.
“This year’s Scholars have proposed exciting projects that will surely push their research in new directions. We are proud to play a part in the career development of these Scholars and extend our support as they deepen their mentoring relationships, broaden their expertise, and propel research that can make a difference in the lives of young people,” said Senior Program Officer Melissa Wooten, who manages the program.
“We’re proud to support these Scholars as they take thoughtful risks, expand their expertise, and pursue research that has the potential to improve outcomes for young people,” Bezos Family Foundation Managing Director Jody Rosentswieg said. “Investments like this help build not only individual careers, but a stronger, more responsive field.”
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With the Scholars award, Tolani Britton will examine whether community college enrollment improves the educational attainment of Black and Latinx youth with conviction histories. The project will not only identify which institutions have the highest persistence, completion, and transfer rates for youth with conviction histories, but also investigate the role of artificial intelligence technology in supporting these students—a stretch area for Britton, whose expertise lies in state criminal law and college enrollment.
“One of the gifts of the Scholars award is the gift of time. Diving into a literature about which I have limited knowledge, and being in student mode in a new way, is super exciting,” Britton said. She will receive mentorship from Zachary Pardos, Associate Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, in adaptive learning and artificial intelligence. Moritz Hardt, director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, will provide mentorship in machine learning and algorithmic decision making.
“I’m hoping that, in some ways, [these relationships] are symbiotic,” Britton said of her mentors. “I’ll spend the initial period learning from these mentors, because they specialize in things that I have very limited knowledge about, but [that I] know have relationships with student outcomes. Then, I believe part of the reason they’re interested in mentoring could be that there are places of improvement, [and] ways to continuously improve and engage with their own content from a different perspective.”
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James Chu spent years working on randomized controlled trials, where he observed that local community members and leaders scarcely referred to the findings produced by the studies. These experiences sparked the questions behind Chu’s Scholars project. With the award, Chu will explore the potential for community forecasting—whereby members of a relevant jurisdiction are invited to work together to review research evidence to predict outcomes of interest to decision-makers—as a strategy for improving research use by school district administrators. The Scholars award offers “an opportunity to learn more about a topic I’d always worried and wondered about, but I’ve never had time to study properly,” he said.
An expert in organizing collaborative scientific projects to compare treatment effects, Chu will gain expertise in the assessment of heterogenous treatment effects in educational contexts through mentorship from Jennie Brand, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Anna Dreber, Professor of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics, will provide mentorship in designing forecast studies.
Upon joining the Scholars community, “I am excited to be able stretch myself with a bunch of other extremely bright, intelligent, and thoughtful individuals who are interested in improving the lives of young people,” Chu said.
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Through the Scholars award, Thania Galvan will assess an intervention to reduce stress among Latinx parents of adolescents. “This project tries to take a family-based approach to reducing psychosocial inequities in Latino adolescents by providing some of the supports directly to the parents. The hope is that in doing so, we’ll be able to create more resilient family systems that not only support the adolescents, but also support the parents, so that they can together buffer the sociocultural stressors that they experience,” Galvan said.
Galvan is an expert in psychosocial disparities in Latinx youth and families. With the Scholars award, Galvan will expand her expertise in health equity and participatory methods through mentorship from Luz Garcini, Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences at Rice University, and in intervention and prevention science, with mentorship from Oswald Moreno, Associate Professor of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“Most of my research has focused on mechanisms and understanding the factors influencing the mental health and psychosocial needs in Latino families, but I’m really excited about moving that research into applied intervention work,” she said. “As I work with some of my established community partners, this is something that they’re really interested in and really want, and something that fills a direct gap.”
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In New York City, eighth graders apply to high school through an algorithm that matches students to schools based on their and the schools’ preferences. But despite this flexibility, students of color and students from lower socioeconomic status undermatch or match to programs lower in quality than the highest quality program they would have been accepted to had they applied. With the Scholars award, Nikhil Garg will explore informational interventions to improve the high school match process in New York City for these students.
“I believe that the best, most impactful research takes some perspectives from a variety of disciplines,” Garg said. “My background is primarily quantitative work, and until I started this project, I was relatively new to this domain and thinking about education and students in particular. Learning from sociologists, from education scholars, from all sorts of folks, [will be] super valuable.”
Sarah Cohodes, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, will provide mentorship on evaluating informational interventions in schools. Parag Pathak, Professor of Economics at MIT and himself a former William T. Grant Scholar, will provide mentorship in working with NYC schools to design choice systems. “They both come from a quantitative background but have throughout their career had on-the-ground impact, both in the New York City high school match process but also in other domains,” Garg said. “I hope to learn from them [and] how to take that background and apply it to the real world.”
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The Indianapolis Nonfatal Shooting Advocate Program connects nonfatal shooting victims to mental health services, improving case resolution, and reducing risk of reinjury and offending. Through the Scholars award, Lauren Magee will assess the impact of the Advocate Program on behavioral and social outcomes among Black youth ages 12-25.
With a background in geospatial analyses of fatal and nonfatal firearm injuries, Magee will stretch her expertise in causal inference and data-driven predictive modeling with mentorship from Kerri Rassan, Senior Research Scientist of Firearm Injury Prevention at the Yale School of Public Health, and in implementation science with mentorship from Matthew Aalsma, Professor of Pediatrics at Indiana University. “The integration of both really will help better determine whether the intervention works, how it works, for whom it works best for, and other contextual conditions about the intervention,” Magee said. “These stretch areas will [benefit] this intervention—gun violence prevention—as well as how we can better implement and understand other youth-focused violence prevention interventions.”
As Magee starts her Scholars project, “I’m really looking forward to engaging with the other scholars in my cohort, as well as the platform of former Scholars and other national scholars that work with the Wiliam T. Grant Foundation.” This community is “another stretch area of career development and mentorship moving forward,” she said.
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In 2015, Washington state mandated the Since Time Immemorial curriculum in all public schools. Developed in collaboration with the state’s 29 federally recognized tribes, this curriculum offers standardized frameworks for teaching tribal sovereignty, historical injustices, and contemporary Native issues. Tribes are now developing community-driven content on their specific histories. In 2025, the Puyallup Tribe signed a memorandum of understanding with thirteen school districts to guide curriculum development on tribal culture and history. Alongside this MOU, the Puyallup Tribal Historic Preservation Department (THPD) is recovering Puyallup children’s boarding school records held by outside institutions for over a century to reclaim tribal authority over their educational narrative.
With the Scholars award, Theresa Rocha Beardall will work under THPD’s direction on two stretch areas centered on Indigenous data sovereignty. She will train in supervised machine learning and co-develop a tribally governed digital infrastructure to analyze boarding school records and support Puyallup curriculum development.
This research will require retrieving large amounts of archival data—a stretch area for Rocha Beardall. To do so, Rocha Beardall will receive mentorship from Corey Abramson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Rice University, in integrating historical microdata with large-scale administrative records. Rocha Beardall will also receive mentorship from Tsianina Lomawaima, Professor Emerita at Arizona State University, in ethical curriculum development honoring Native practices.”For too long, others have decided what counts as knowledge about Native communities in public education, often getting it wrong or leaving it out entirely. I’m thrilled to develop skills that support Native nations in reclaiming that authority and ensuring their data, stories, and knowledge systems shape what future generations learn,” Rocha Beardall said.
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Physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep, collectively referred to as 24-hour movement behaviors, play a key role in youth development. Yet, Vietnamese-American youth face heightened risks for inadequate physical activity and sleep and more sedentary behavior due to higher screen usage than peers. With the Scholars award, Milkie Vu will investigate a parenting intervention to improve 24-hour movement behaviors of U.S. Vietnamese youth.
“I appreciate the ability to be able to take my research—it’s still the same community, it’s still the same community engagement that I’ve done—but in terms of the topic, it’s a different focus that are the priorities and concerns of parents in the community,” Vu said. “For me to be able to have the time to get this training and build relationships and learn from my mentors’ expertise, is really exciting.”
Vu will receive mentorship from Soyang Kwon, Research Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Northwestern University, in measuring 24-hour movement behaviors in youth, and Namratha Kandula, Professor of Medicine and Preventive Medicine and in the Program of Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, in community-engaged, multi-behavior lifestyle interventions.
“Being able to build a network of people who are interested in research on reducing inequality among youth, especially those from immigrant and language-minority backgrounds—it’s so important,” Vu said about the Scholars community.
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