Shuhan “Alice” Ai is a Graduate Student Researcher at UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools, where she supports the Genuine Empathy Nurturing Intellect for Underserved Students (GENIUS) Initiative. Her research focuses on STEM education, higher education, and quantitative methods, with the goal of advancing care-centered scholarship and translating data-driven evidence into equitable, student-centered action. Alice is a fourth-year doctoral student in UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies, pursuing a PhD in Higher Education and Organizational Change. She is also pursuing an M.S. in Statistics and Data Science at UCLA.
Before joining CTS, Alice worked as a Graduate Student Researcher on projects examining access to STEM courses in U.S. public high schools and evaluating the NIH-funded BUILD program’s impact on underrepresented students’ science identity, STEM aspirations, and persistence. She has experience with causal inference, multilevel modeling, social network analysis, event history analysis, and large-scale education datasets. Her dissertation examines whether community service and community-based experiences foster STEM students’ civic engagement, social agency, and commitment to social change. Alice holds an M.S.Ed. in Higher Education from the University of Pennsylvania and enjoys playing table tennis, practicing Chinese calligraphy, and painting.
