ELS Lab - Meet Our Team

ELS Lab Director

Dr. Zhiling Meng Shea

I am the director of the ELS Lab. I am an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Before that, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, Postdoctoral Fellow at The Ohio State University, Research Scientist at the University of Virginia.

My research integrates developmental science, data-driven evidence, and policy analysis to strengthen the learning systems that support young children and their families, particularly for multilingual learners. Through an interdisciplinary approach, I strive to generate actionable insights that promote equity in early education systems and nurture the holistic development of all children.

My work has been published in top-tier journals and funded by the American Educational Research Association and the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Special Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education.

I graduated from the University of California, Irvine with a Ph.D. in Education in 2022. I hold a master in Public Policy from the Heller School of Brandies University, and a bachelor’s degree in Business from Johnson & Wales University.

I am very excited to discuss research and collaborate on projects to promote child development. Feel free to contact me for collaboration!

Graduate researchers

Jiacan He

Lab Manager

Jiacan He is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds a strong quantitative background in applied microeconomics, causal inference, and data analysis, with research interests spanning education policy, labor markets, and social inequality. Her work combines large-scale administrative data, survey data, and econometric methods to study how institutional environments and policy interventions shape individual outcomes.

As a Lab Manager in the ELS Lab, Jiacan supports the design, implementation, and analysis of research projects related to educational practices and student development. She looks forward to contributing to collaborative, interdisciplinary research that bridges economics, education, and policy.

Qilin Zhou

Qilin Zhou is a graduate researcher working at the intersection of machine learning, language technologies, and human-centered AI. She works with the University of Chicago Knowledge Lab and Argonne National Laboratory on developing scalable retrieval-augmented generation systems, tools for interpreting large language models, and document-intelligence methods applied to policy data. Her broader interests focus on how AI systems process and support language development, with applications in early learning, educational assessment, and child-language understanding. She has collaborated with clinicians, educators, and public-sector partners on projects involving language development, trauma-informed assessment, and multilingual information extraction, and she is excited to contribute these perspectives to ongoing work in the Early Learning Systems Lab.

Yuemeng Wang

Yuemeng Wang is a doctoral student in Educational Psychology (Special Education) at the University of Connecticut. Prior to this, I earned my MS in educational sciences from KU Leuven in Belgium and my BA in English from Shandong University. My work focuses on equitable Tier 1 PBIS/MTSS implementation and inclusion in general education. I’m also interested in leveraging large language models to enhance teacher preparation and professional development to advance these goals.

Joana Aba Riverson

Graduate Research Assistant

Joana Aba Riverson is a master’s student in Early Childhood Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a Graduate Research Assistant in the Early Learning Systems Lab. She brings a strong interdisciplinary background informed by psychology and education, with experience working at the intersection of child development, learning, and mental health.

Her interests grow out of hands-on engagement with children and families, particularly around early developmental challenges, disability, and access to supportive learning environments. Joana is especially interested in how early educational experiences intersect with children’s emotional and behavioral development, and how research can better inform early intervention and inclusive practices.

As a member of the Early Learning Systems Lab, she supports collaborative research projects and is developing skills in applied research that connect developmental theory with real-world educational contexts. Her longer-term goal is to contribute to work that improves early learning experiences for children who are often underserved in educational systems.

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