Team

Dr. Brigid Barron 
Brigid Barron is a Professor of Education and the Learning Sciences at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Her research investigates the dynamics of interest driven learning to better understand how sustained engagement relates to the diversity of opportunities within and across home, school, and community settings.  She takes an ecological approach to understand social and relational aspects of learning with a focus on how caregivers and educators catalyze learning by brokering access to resources, collaborating, and coordinating activities across time.  These inquiries include a focus on how digital technologies can be leveraged to provide more equitable access to content and expertise.  At Stanford she teaches in the Learning Design and Technology MA program, the Learning Sciences and Technology Design doctoral program and the Developmental and Psychological Sciences doctoral program.  She was a lead researcher in the NSF-funded LIFE Center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments), investigating the social foundations of learning across diverse communities, contexts, and domains.  She is a co-lead of TELOS, a Stanford Graduate School of Education Initiative to investigate how technologies can provide more equitable access to learning opportunities. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Learning Sciences and Cognition and Instruction.  Dr. Barron received her doctorate from Vanderbilt University in Developmental and Clinical Psychology.

Caitlin K. Martin
Caitlin is a learning sciences researcher, evaluator, and design strategist whose work examines how learning and opportunity take shape across community settings over time. Through her consulting practice, she leads mixed-methods studies that emphasize participatory, practice-centered approaches, partnering with practitioners to design and refine programs and initiatives while analyzing the broader landscapes in which they operate. Her work often centers public library systems and their roles as community learning infrastructures, and includes the use of data visualization and GIS-based mapping to make patterns in access and local assets visible. She works closely with academic research groups to explore youth development, family learning, opportunity landscapes, and emerging technologies. 

Luna Laliberte  
Luna Laliberte is a second year doctoral student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, studying in both the learning sciences and technology design and developmental and psychological sciences programs. Her background lies in Communications and Media research, which she has leveraged for digital ethnographic research, game design, and makerspace education experiences. Her earlier work in documenting remote learning strategies used by undergraduates during the pandemic was recently published by MIT Press in the book Youth Wellbeing by Design. Her current goals are to support adult learners in rediscovering their love for learning, and recently her work has focused on digital communities as hubs for connecting adults to learning opportunities. Luna centers positive emotions in her research to better understand how relational and material resources are shaped by both emotions and learning environments. She strives to incorporate critical design thinking, critical making, and multimodal approaches in her analyses to capture the nuances of how positive emotions catalyze adult learning experiences. 

Sonia Tiwari
Sonia Tiwari is the Director of Research at Oki Pie Lab where she explores the role of children’s media characters as facilitators of creative learning experiences. Prior to her PhD in Learning, Design, and Technology, she worked in the gaming industry as a character designer. Her research on designing ethical AI characters for young children was invited for presentation at organizations such as Harvard GSE, PennGSE, Stanford GSE, MIT RAISE, UC Berkeley, National Geographic, Edtech Insiders podcast, and UNICEF CoP. Her research exploring applications of character-themed AI tools in art workshops for families of young children, was recently awarded Outstanding Design Case by the American Educational Research Association Design and Technology SIG. Her broader goal is to support children’s creative wellbeing through the combined power of early childhood education, character design, and the expressive arts. 

Flora Troy
Flora Troy is a learning designer and education researcher focused on the well-being of children and families through creative, research-backed curriculum design. She holds an M.Ed. in Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in Human Biology (Child Development) from Stanford University, where she also completed an honors thesis on collaborative arts education and social-emotional learning in early childhood. Currently a Learning Designer at Lando Interactive, Flora designs playful, research-informed curricula for early elementary learners, including a tycoon-style math game in development and a Scratch-based coding and game design program now active in 300+ schools. Her background spans curriculum development for digital citizenship at Common Sense Media, SEL lesson design, and qualitative research at Stanford’s YouthLab. 

Ryan Pilat
Ryan is a learning experience designer working at the intersection of STEM, making, and creativity. Her research work centers on K–12 engineering education and developing tools to support students in interest-driven design experiences, with support from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning’s Joyful Learning seed grant. She brings many years of experience developing creative STEM products and curriculum materials for kids of all ages through roles at KiwiCo, as well as experience teaching AI literacy through the AI Tinkery at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Ryan holds an M.S. in Education (Learning Design and Technology) from the Stanford GSE and a B.S. in Physics from Stanford University. She is passionate about creating playful learning experiences that inspire and empower students. 

Lab Alumni

Ugochi Acholonu 
April Ball
Sophie Chen
Kia Darling-Hammond  
Indigo Esmonde
Rachel Fithian
Karin Forssell
Michelle Friend 
Susie Garcia
Amber Maria Levinson
Emma Mercier
Cindy K. Lam 
Sarah Lewis
Veronica Lin
Ofelia Mangen
Jolie Matthews
Véronique Mertl  
Rose K. Pozos
Chris Proctor  
Kathleen Remmington
Brandon Reynante
Maryanna Rogers
Aekta Shah
Daniel Stringer 
Colin Schatz
Lori Takeuchi
Sarah Walter
Susie Wise