Ilana Umansky is an Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. Her work explores how education policy impacts the educational opportunities and outcomes of immigrant, multilingual and English learner-classified students often using largescale data and longitudinal and quasi-experimental methods. She holds a PhD from Stanford University in Sociology of Education and is particularly interested in topics such as language policy, course access, and labeling as she focuses on partnership-centered research to support equitable and excellent school systems for immigrant and multilingual students. Currently she is working on a California-based project to support the expansion of bilingual education in high schools, an impact evaluation of California’s academic criterion for reclassification, and a national center examining secondary multilingual students’ access to core content in school and levers to expand that access. Her work appears in leading education journals and has received funding and awards from multiple public and philanthropic agencies.

Karen Thompson is an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Oregon State University. She partners with education agencies to analyze opportunities and outcomes for multilingual students in K-12 schools. Her work has been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the Office of English Language Acquisition, and the Spencer Foundation. In recognition of her innovative research and commitment to community service, she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Her scholarship has been published in leading venues such as Educational Researcher and the American Educational Research Journal. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics from Stanford University., and prior to entering academia, she was a bilingual elementary school teacher.

Janette Avelar is a PhD Candidate in Quantitative Research Methods in Education at the University of Oregon (expected graduation June 2026), where she specializes in Educational Data Science. Her research examines how language-related policies and institutional decision-making structures shape educational access and opportunity for multilingual students. Using mixed methods and large-scale longitudinal data, she studies how systems distribute power and opportunity across racialized and linguistic lines. She is particularly interested in how districts may redesign systems to position multilingual students at the center rather than the margins. In addition to her doctoral work, she serves as a Research Analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, contributing to projects on school innovation and district transformation. She holds an MS in Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership from the University of Oregon and a BA in Spanish, English, and Latin American Studies from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Jaclyn B. Bovee is a doctoral candidate in Language, Equity and Educational Policy at Oregon State University. A former high school English Language Development teacher, her research focuses on how educational policies impact multilingual learners’ access, inclusion, and belonging. As a member of multiple IES-funded research teams and a state-wide researcher-practitioner collaborative, she works to better understand and support just educational opportunities for multilingual students classified as English learners.

Nami Shin is a Senior Research Associate at Accessible Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Systems (ATLAS), a research center at the University of Kansas. Her research explores how educational policies, programs, and assessments affect K–12 students, especially for students with disabilities and multilingual learners. Her work has been published in journals such as Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Assessment, and Bilingual Research Journal. Before joining ATLAS, she was a research scientist at CRESST, UCLA, where she conducted research and provided psychometric support for three large-scale assessment consortiums — the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), the English Language Proficiency Assessment for the 21st Century (ELPA21) Consortium, and the Collaborative for the Alternate Assessment of English Language Proficiency (CAAELP). She earned her PhD from the Division of Social Research Methodology in the Department of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Before entering academia, she taught English as a foreign language in a middle school in Seoul, South Korea. 

Havisha Khurana is a Ph.D. candidate in the Quantitative Research Methods in Education program at the University of Oregon. She holds a bachelor’s in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and a master’s in Economics from the University of Oregon. Drawing from her experience as an educator in a low-income school through the Teach for India fellowship, her research uses descriptive and advanced quantitative methods to examine the impact of education policies on the experiences of students with disabilities and multilingual students in the USA and India. 

Dr. Bromley is a Research Associate in the Center on Human Development, a multidisciplinary research unit at the University of Oregon that includes the University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities. Her research focuses on the development of and outcomes associated with social capital, and practices that promote secondary students with disabilities transitioning to postsecondary education and employment. Her research has been funded by the Office of Special Education Programs and the Institute of Education Sciences. Dr. Bromley previously worked directly with young adults with disabilities in postsecondary education and she is a licensed special education teacher.

Dr. Jamey Burho founded Dual Promise, a professional learning service to empower educators to best serve students identified as multilingual learners with disabilities, or dually identified students. Prior to this role, she completed a Post Doc at Oregon State University, where she conducted a case study with dually identified students and researched co-teaching for multilingual learners. Burho began her education career in Washington, D.C. as a special education teacher in Title I elementary schools. She holds a Ph.D. in Special Education from the University of Maryland.