This page is to showcase the people who have been awarded grants through PERTG.

Duncan McBride Travel Grant
The Duncan McBride PER Conference Award has been established by AAPT and PERTG in appreciation and gratitude for Dr. McBride's advocacy for the field of Physics Education Research and his deep, sustained commitment to the field as a means of improving undergraduate physics education. This award is a fitting tribute as it embodies the key values that Duncan advocated, and we seek to support AAPT members who will broaden and engage with our community, particularly but not exclusively focusing on graduate students, postdocs, two-year college faculty, and/or those transitioning into PER. The award covers travel, lodging and registration for both the AAPT Summer Meeting and accompanying PER Conference.
Awardee
Camila Monsalve Avendaño
Camila is graduate student in physics education research at Michigan State University planning to defend next 2026 Spring. Her work focuses on understanding and addressing systemic barriers faced by transfer students of color in physics. At AAPT/PERC 2025, she will be presenting in the session "Supporting Transfer Students and Other Lessons Learned from TYCs." Her oral presentation, "A Wonder: A Student and Faculty/Staff Talk About an Idea to Address Systemic Discrimination Experienced by Transfer Students of Color," and her poster, "A Journey to Become Aware of How Our Transfer Students of Color Experience Systemic Discrimination," both explore collaborative efforts to create more equitable and inclusive experiences for transfer students. Then at PERC, she will be in the session of "Gloria Anzaldúa coming into PER." She is really looking forward to show case a large part of my dissertation with the AAPT, PERC and OPTYCs community. Specifically, NSF sponsored TAG Racial Equity Grant that she was part of was abruptly terminated on April 25th, 2025. Receiving the Duncan McBride PER Conference Award is supporting her to attend the space she cares, to show up in while there is political turmoil.


PERTG Travel Grant
The PERTG Travel Grant is intended to support travel to a professional conference; preference is given to presenters and to travelers to AAPT meetings.
Awardees
Alexis Buzzell: Funding to attend 2025 Summer AAPT Meeting/PERC
Alexis is a 4th year PhD candidate, planning to graduate next spring, in 2026. She is looking for PER post-doctoral opportunities, particularly within the realm of quantum education. Alexis will be presenting a poster at PERC on the assessment of a combined human coding and natural language processing method for use in qualitative analysis PER. 


Atharva Dange: Funding to attend 2025 Summer AAPT Meeting/PERC
Atharva is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research focuses on physics education technology and computational grounded theory.


Parker Poulos: Funding to attend 2025 Summer AAPT Meeting/PERC
Parker is a rising fourth year PhD student at K-State studying how we can make written, actionable assessment feedback for instructors to use to improve their courses. He will be presenting a poster on the theoretical frameworks used in the feedback for the Thermal and Statistical Physics Assessment (TaSPA), and how these might be applied to existing research-based assessments. The title of Parker's poster is "Synthesizing multiple theoretical frameworks to create actionable assessment feedback"