The College of Education is home this fall to two doctoral students who received prestigious, new Presidential Graduate Fellows awards from the University of Georgia Research Foundation and Graduate School.

Amy Hackenberg and Julie Sanchez have both taken long, circuitous routes to arrive at UGA where they will be engaged in research and graduate studies for the next three to five years.

Hackenberg, who comes to UGA after teaching in suburban schools in Chicago and Los Angeles, is pursuing a doctorate in math education. Sanchez, who taught at a school for students with learning disabilities and/or emotional problems in Raleigh, N.C., worked with pigtail macaques at Emory University's Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, and studied both dolphin language at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Hawaii and dolphin population patterns in New Zealand, is seeking a doctorate in school psychology, specializing in neuropsychology.

The new graduate awards program is designed to recruit exceptionally qualified students to UGA. Only 12 such awards have been made campus wide for 2000-01, the program's first year. The awards are for multiple years of support with an annual stipend of $20,000 plus tuition.

Here's a more personal look at the two outstanding new COE scholars:

Julie Sanchez

It's hardly surprising Julie Sanchez wants to become a school neuropsychologist. After all, her father is an agricultural/forestry researcher and her mother is a school psychologist. It almost seems fated that she would find her way into a career researching in the field of neuropsychology

Born in Cali, Columbia, where her father was doing research, Sanchez and her family moved to Raleigh, N.C., when she was six years old. Growing up in North Carolina, she was fascinated by the stories her mother told at the dinner table of her work as a psychologist at a clinic for children with learning problems. She was hooked.

Sanchez earned a bachelor of arts degree in psychology at Emory University, graduating summa cum laude with a 3.6 GPA in May 1998. But before leaving Emory, she did an honors thesis researching the relationship between crowding and aggression in pigtailed macaques at the Yerkes Primate Center.

After graduation, her interest moved from monkeys to dolphins with a summer internship at the Kawalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, HI. There she researched the comprehension of a gestural language in Atlantic bottlenose dolphins.
 

"I learned a great deal about research methods and the research process there," she says. "But I was frustrated because I wanted to understand not only how dolphins use language, but also how their brains are related to their behaviors. And how can we apply what we discover about other species to better our understanding of humans?"

After Hawaii, Sanchez participated in a two-month study on the population patterns of the rare Hector's dolphin in New Zealand in a project run by the New England Aquarium of Boston. While she learned more about the rigors of field research, she also discovered her research interests lay in different areas than those of her fellow researchers.

"While other members of the research team were interested in dolphin habits and migration, it was the dolphins' brains that fascinated me - their intelligence, perceptive abilities, learning and communication," she says.

Upon returning to North Carolina in August 1998, Sanchez began working at a small school and tutoring agency for children with learning disabilities and/or emotional problems including students with ADHD, dyslexia, traumatic brain injury due to nutritional deprivation, memory dysfunction due to drug use, Agent Orange Syndrome and bipolar disorder.

"Because I found these experiences with children and adolescents immensely rewarding, I decided that I wanted to continue working with individuals with special needs and better understand the organic causes of their disabilities," she says.

To gain a better understanding of the neurological basis of such learning problems, Sanchez took a graduate class at North Carolina State University on the neuropsychology of exceptional children.

"The course material fascinated me, particularly the organic correlates of dyslexia and ADHD and the effects of brain injury and chemotherapy on cognitive abilities," she says. "It was then that I decided to go to graduate school in school psychology and specialize in neuropsychology."

Sanchez says she selected UGA because of the reputation of the program, the research being done here and the faculty in school psychology. "I was impressed by the careers and appointments graduates of the program have gone on to receive," she says. "I was also very impressed by Dr. (George) Hynd's work on the neurological basis of dyslexia and working on this research with Dr. Hynd was a major motivation for my acceptance of UGA's offer."

Sanchez will be working on a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) study with Hynd to determine if the neurological abnormalities he has found in children with dyslexia extend to their parents and unaffected siblings.

"I think this research will help us not only better understand dyslexia, but also better understand how language and reading are processed in the brain," she says.

And what does she hope to be doing several years from now? "Truth is, I'm not sure. I know I want to be a clinician and a researcher, and I would also be interested in teaching. So maybe that means an academic position at a research institution or being in private practice," she says.

Her mother, now a school psychologist in Atlanta, is thrilled to have her close by. Sanchez's father now lives in Nairobi, Kenya, where he researches agriculture and forestry.
 

Amy Hackenberg

A native of Evanston, Ill., Amy Hackenberg has also taken a roundabout way to get to UGA.

"I have sort of an eclectic history, I suppose," she says. "I've had a lifelong quest to unite my interest in the arts and mathematics. In college, I actually studied architecture with the idea that I was going to be combining my interests in art and math. That was a little bit forced. I found it fascinating, but it wasn't my true love."

Hackenberg first discovered her interest in teaching when she taught dance while in college in Boston. "I've danced all of my life - since I was 9. I was ballet trained. I started teaching dance and it was like, 'You know, I think I want to teach.'" she says. "So I either wanted to teach math or literature because those are the two things I love the most."

After earning her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, Hackenberg ended up teaching math - first, at a private girls' school in Los Angeles for three years, and then after earning a master's in math education at the University of Chicago, in an Evanston high school for the next several years.

Hackenberg came to Georgia with her boyfriend, Evan Glazer, who is a graduate student in Instructional Technology. She came to get a break from the hectic pace of teaching, and perhaps, work on a master's in fiction-writing. She had no intention of pursuing a doctorate in math education.

"We had both been high school teachers for several years, and Evan knew he wanted to start this Ph.D. program here," she says. "Georgia is unique in that it has an incredibly strong IT (instructional technology) department and an incredibly strong math education department. He was going to do his Ph.D. in IT, but his close love to that is mathematics education. Actually, he's interested in how technology affects learning in math education. So he felt Georgia would be the best place."

When the pair moved to Athens, Hackenberg took a position as a degree program assistant in the math education. "I felt like OK, this is going to work out. I'll work at the university and I'll write... and it has been a good mix. But I guess I was naive to think I wasn't interested in math education any more - because I am!" she says. "I want to be an math educator who writes fiction sometimes. That would be ideal. We'll see if that actually works out."

And that's not far off the mark from what Hackenberg will be researching at UGA. "I want to study learning," she says. "I'm fascinated by the connections I see between writing stories and problem solving in mathematics. Its hypotheses are quite parallel."

Hackenberg says her first inclination of the similar processes was entering both areas not knowing. "People have the misconception that when you write fiction, you plan it out. Nothing could be further from the truth," she says. "You often start with a fragment of something and from there it's about being in a place where you don't know and asking lots of questions. 'Well, what is this character like? What would happen next?' You have a definite control in the process, but you're really asking a lot of 'what if' questions.

"It's the same thing when you're solving a math problem - in true problem solving mode where you're not just applying logarithms. You have some questions to ask about what mathematics that you know might help me solve this. But you don't know how you're going to get to the resolution. And that's very similar," she says.

Hackenberg wants to find out whether these connections between math and fiction writing have an impact on student beliefs and views of mathematics. "I developed a geometry curriculum with a colleague at my old school and we had some units where the kids were so engaged in problem solving they didn't even realize the bell had rung," she says.

"That's the kind of experience I want them to have. I mean, it almost doesn't matter which subject you're talking about - it matters that they're engaged, that they're interested, that they're compelled by what they're doing and so, ultimately, that's probably what I'm geared toward," she says. "How does that experience come about and how can you orchestrate that experience?"