About
I grew up in Bhutan and trained as a science teacher, earning my B.Ed. in Biology and Chemistry from Samtse College of Education before teaching at Gomphu Lower Secondary School. In 2010, I received a scholarship from Bhutan's Royal Education Council to pursue a Master's degree at Teachers College, Columbia University — part of a national investment in building the country's teacher-education capacity.
After completing my Ed.M., I returned to Bhutan to help found the Centenary Institute of Education, a new national teacher-training institute, where I served as founding faculty and, from 2012 to 2014, as Incharge — the Institute's senior-most on-site leadership position (colleagues and partner institutions often called the role "Officiating Director"). As Incharge, I carried out all executive, administrative, and policy functions of the director for the full duration of my tenure there. In that role I also designed and led nationwide professional-development programs for school leaders, eventually reaching every one of Bhutan's twenty Dzongkhags (administrative districts).
The Institute's leadership granted me financial aid and leave to return to Columbia for doctoral study, where my research question sharpened into what became my dissertation: a Multi-Compartment Network Model of Teacher Education (MCNMTE), empirically tested in both the U.S. and Bhutan, that explains why standards-aligned intentions so often fail to survive into standards-aligned classroom lesson plans — and what a teacher-preparation program can do about it.
Alongside my doctoral work, I spent nearly eight years at Teachers College's Office of Access and Services for Individuals with Disabilities, first as an Office Administrative Assistant and later as Accommodations Specialist, coordinating accommodations for students with disabilities. Building on that experience, I am now extending my dissertation's model to integrate Universal Design for Learning and accessibility principles as a next line of research, so that standards-based teaching and accessible teaching are designed together rather than as separate concerns.
I defended my dissertation in December 2023 and am now a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Teachers College, developing this research into peer-reviewed publications, a diagnostic tool for teacher-preparation programs, and the follow-on accessibility-focused study described above.