Sandhya Krishnan

Not many people can say that they found a job they enjoy through failure! While I fell in love with the neurosciences at the University of Michigan, I never considered anything but medical school. Meeting failure after academic failure at Wayne State University School of Medicine led me to re-evaluate how I learned and what I loved what about learning with help from supportive counsellors and faculty. Leaving medical school, I worked in K-12 education before starting a graduate program in Science Education at the University of Georgia.

My own experiences translated into my dissertation research, examining whether and how students' failures could lead to learning in science. I studied how students made sense of failure and how their understandings of failure contributed to fitting into the scientific community in certain ways that only failure could do. This work led me to FLAMEnet, a community of scientists, psychologists, and educators who were also thinking about how to utilize challenges in STEM learning into learning opportunities... and a few years later, I became a postdoc with this same research coordination network. While a postdoc with FLAMEnet, my mentors (Dr. Jen Heemstra, Dr. Lou Charkoudian, and Dr. Lisa Corwin) supported me in writing and submitting my first NSF grant proposal. 

As a recipient of the NSF STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the inaugural year of this program, I have had the enormous privilege of working with Dr. Lisa Corwin more closely. In conducting a large-scale investigation into student failures in course-based research experiences across the nation, we have worked with fantastic instructors passionate about science and learning and heard incredible stories of resilience from students.

Now, we're also investigating how scientists experience failure and the supports that helped them navigate these experiences, hoping to create resources for students to connect with scientist stories!

My experiences with failure led me to research that I love, a job I love, all while working with people who inspire me. I love to chat about what I do and the experiences that led me here, so please do reach out to me if you want to know more!