Jessica Rodrigues

Emerging Broader Impacts Leader

University of Missouri

Dr. Jessica Rodrigues received her PhD in Education at the University of Delaware (UD), and UD recently awarded Dr. Rodrigues with the Alumni Trailblazer Award that recognizes an early-career scholar for distinguishing themselves in their profession. Following receipt of her PhD, Dr. Rodrigues completed a highly competitive postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California. She started as a full-time faculty member at the University of Missouri in the Department of Special Education in 2019. She was awarded the MU College of Education & Human Development (CEHD) Faculty Outstanding Research and Scholarship Award – Early Career in 2022 and the Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Research and Creative Activity Award in 2023. She was also recently selected as the MU Division of Research, Innovation, and Impact Faculty Fellow starting Spring 2024, to leverage her experience with and expertise about NSF funding for supporting fellow MU faculty in their pursuit of CAREER awards.

A powerful component of Dr. Rodrigues’ research program is her unwavering commitment to broader impacts, and she reflects this focus in her two new U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) awards as Principal Investigator. Both of her NSF grants focus on the improvement of research communication strategies with broad audiences for the purposes of supporting mathematics and STEM success for students with disabilities. Her work holds promise for not only raising attention to the importance of translating research for societal impacts, but also for sharing guidance with other researchers and organizations about how to mobilize knowledge in effective ways for wider audiences. The findings from her two NSF projects and the deliverable outcomes have potential for contributing critical knowledge and recommendations for the field.