Biography

Dr. Katherine Picho-Kiroga is a quantitative research methodologist by training, with a doctorate in Social and Educational Psychology from the University of Connecticut. She is an expert in survey development and validation, and has conducted workshops on instrument development and validation for the American Educational Research Association (AERA). 

Dr. Picho-Kiroga lends expertise in quantitative modeling and methodology to various high impact educational projects with agencies such as the World Bank Group, and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She is also involved in several initiatives with Karat Inc, to bridge the hiring divide for Black software engineers within big technology companies like Google.

Katherine’s research centers on the role of social learning contexts and their impact on the interest, engagement and performance of women and people of color in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Specifically, she seeks to understand key contextual factors that exacerbate stereotype threat in K-12 school settings, and how these contexts interact with psychological factors to sabotage the achievement of members of these groups in STEM.

As part of this effort, Dr. Picho-Kiroga has developed an intervention to attenuate social identity threat among women and students of color in STEM. An efficacy study of this intervention, funded by the National Science Foundation, is currently underway at Howard University’s School of Engineering and Computer Science.