About Me

Brendan is a PhD student at the Computing, Reasoning, and Expression Lab at the Berkeley School of Education and is advised by Michelle Wilkerson. His research focuses on critical approaches to computing education as well as the intersection of computing and STEM education. He conducts research on how K-12 teachers learn to become CS teachers and how their learning of CS changes when CS is presented through a critically conscious curriculum. In his K-12 research, he has studied how middle school students program computational models to understand and learn science.

He has presented and published his research in conferences such as the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), the Technical Symposium of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) as well as the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association and Constructionism Conference. His work on critical consciousness and CS teachers won first place in the SIGCSE graduate student research competition in 2023.

He holds a M.A. in Urban Education from Loyola Marymount University where his thesis on emerging labor practices in California charter and public schools won honorable mention for the LMU Graduate Library Research Awards. While receiving his M.A. he was a credentialed middle school science teacher in the West Contra Costa Unified School District. He received his B.A. in Cognitive Science with high honors from the University of California, Berkeley.