Ying ChenDoctoral Portfolio

Professional Goals

In Professional Goals, you will find an overview of the academic career I hope to pursue and the goals I am working toward as I continue my doctoral study. The Summary describes my goals across research, teaching and mentoring, and academic service. The Career Pathway outlines the steps I hope to take toward a faculty career and includes an example of a position that reflects the direction I am considering.

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01

Summary

My professional goal is to pursue a faculty career in higher education. I hope to build a career that brings together research, teaching, mentoring, and academic service. My broad interests lie in artificial intelligence in education, collaborative learning, and human–AI interaction. These areas continue to change as technologies become more deeply integrated into how people learn, communicate, and work together. I want to remain close to these changes and study the questions they create for learners and educators. Through this work, I hope to contribute to the thoughtful use of emerging technologies in education and to connect research with meaningful educational practice.

Research will remain a central part of the career I hope to build. I am interested in how people learn, collaborate, and make decisions in technology-supported environments, especially as AI becomes a more active part of those environments. I hope to develop a research program that connects learning sciences with emerging technologies and draws on different theoretical and methodological perspectives. I am also interested in working across disciplines, since questions about AI and learning increasingly extend beyond the boundaries of a single field. Over time, I hope to lead collaborative projects, pursue external funding, and contribute research that is useful to both scholarly communities and educational practice. Most importantly, I want to keep asking questions that grow from genuine curiosity and matter to the people and contexts I study.

Teaching and mentoring are equally important to the kind of faculty member I hope to become. My experiences as a teaching assistant, course developer, and lecturer have shown me that teaching involves much more than presenting content. It requires listening to learners, understanding where they struggle, and making thoughtful decisions about activities, resources, feedback, and assessment. As a faculty member, I hope to teach courses related to instructional design, learning sciences, educational technology, research methods, and AI in education. I also want to involve students in research and give them opportunities to develop their own questions and ideas. I benefited greatly from mentors who welcomed my curiosity and allowed me to learn through participation. I hope to create a similarly supportive environment for the students I work with in the future.

I also see service and collaboration as an important part of academic life. Through peer review, conference participation, research collaboration, and other forms of academic service, I have begun to understand how scholarly communities are built through many different kinds of contributions. In the future, I hope to contribute to professional organizations, departmental and university initiatives, peer review, and interdisciplinary projects. I value opportunities to work with people who bring different methodological, disciplinary, and cultural perspectives to educational questions. As I gain experience, I would also like to support students and early-career scholars who are finding their own paths into research. I hope to become a thoughtful and dependable member of the academic communities I join, and to continue learning from the people around me.

02

Career Pathway

My next step is to continue preparing for a faculty career during the remaining years of my doctoral study. I hope to further develop my research agenda, strengthen my publication record, and gain more experience in leading research projects from initial ideas to completed studies. I also want to learn more about grant development and external funding and continue building my teaching experience. These are areas where I still have room to grow before entering the faculty job market. After completing my Ph.D., my primary goal is to pursue a tenure-track faculty position at a research-intensive university, particularly an R1 institution.

As an early-career faculty member, I hope to gradually establish an independent and sustained research program. I would like to build collaborations across disciplines and eventually develop a research team that brings together faculty and students with different areas of expertise. This is especially important to me because many questions about AI and human learning increasingly connect education with psychology, computer science, neuroscience, and other fields. An R1 university can provide the research resources, interdisciplinary communities, graduate programs, and broader academic environment that make this kind of work possible.

Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor of Learning Sciences – RISE-AI

About the Role

This faculty position sits at the intersection of Learning Sciences and Artificial Intelligence. The role emphasizes building an innovative research program that investigates learning and AI, publishing in leading journals and conferences, securing external funding, teaching Learning Sciences courses, and mentoring graduate students. Areas of interest include AI-supported learning and assessment, human–AI interaction, collaborative learning, generative AI, and the use of AI to better understand learning processes.

Key Areas

  • Learning Sciences
  • AI in Education
  • Human–AI Interaction
  • Research
  • Teaching & Mentoring
  • External Funding

Key Qualifications

  • Ph.D. in Learning Sciences, Education, Educational Psychology, or a related field
  • Strong or developing scholarly research program
  • Research experience in Learning Sciences and AI in Education
  • Publications and conference presentations
  • Potential for external research funding
  • Graduate and undergraduate teaching and mentoring
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