Ph.D. in Education Candidate Receives NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship

Megumi Asada, a Rutgers Graduate School of Education (GSE) Ph.D. in Education candidate, has been named a recipient of the 2025 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.

The competitive fellowship provides funding and professional development to early-career scholars whose projects address critical issues in the history, theory, or practice of formal or informal education at the national and international levels. Asada is one of the 35 dissertation fellows selected from a pool of more than 400 applicants, each receiving $27,500 in funding.

Megumi Asada

““I am extremely honored to have been selected as a finalist,” Asada said. “I have only gotten to this point because of the amazing mentorship and advice I’ve received at the GSE. I especially want to thank Drew Gitomer, Dan Battey, and my adviser, Keith Weber.”

Asada’s research explores abolitionist and emancipatory possibilities in advanced undergraduate mathematics and opportunities to tie advanced mathematics to the development of students’ political consciousness.

Their study, titled “Teaching logic for social justice: Connecting advanced mathematics and logic to an abolitionist perspective,” aims to develop and test the viability of a learning trajectory for how students can use competencies from proof-based mathematics to support their sensemaking about prisons and abolition.

“My experiences with proof have often felt disconnected from reality,” Asada said. “At times, I’ve been asked to ignore the racism and sexism taking place in class or to disengage with the news because it was seen as a distraction from my mathematics coursework. I know people who were unwilling to do these things and felt that mathematics wasn’t for them, as a result.”

Asada said they hope their research can, in some small way, envision ways of learning proof throughout K-12 and postsecondary education that “do not ask us to ignore the world around us and can instead enable us to connect with it, better understand it, and move to change it.”

More information on the fellowship can be found on the National Academy of Education website.