You may best remember Batouly Camara from her days on the court at UConn, but she’s stayed plenty busy since then. She wrote a children’s book, “A Basketball Game on Wake Street,” made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, was honored at the ESPYs, and plans to travel to Africa to pursue an Olympic dream. In this week’s UConn Report podcast, hosted by Hearst Connecticut Media’s Doug Bonjour, Camara discusses her latest ventures both within and outside basketball.

Westbrook Public Schools is pleased to announce the appointment of Matthew Talmadge as the new Westbrook Middle School principal effective July 1.

Through the help of Zaghi, Hain, Civil Engineering Professor Richard Christenson, Educational Psychology Professor Joseph Madaus, English Professor Tom Deans, and Literacy Education Professor Rachael Gabriel, the team will be developing a strength profiler tool, creating a peer mentoring program, piloting a technical writing program, and holding stakeholder workshops.

UConn had an all-time high of 17 semifinalists for the Fulbright Student Program award, which includes the six finalists and three alternates.

This is not the end, it’s the beginning. That was the message from U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona ’01 MA, ’04 6th Year, ’11 Ed.D., ’12 ELP to UConn’s 2021 graduates, delivered Saturday, May 8 via video during the livestreamed commencement ceremony for all students receiving degrees this year – undergraduate, graduate, and professional.

For Rachael Manzer, a doctoral candidate in the Neag School of Education, life-transformative education takes many forms. Manzer is a five-year volunteer of the UConn 4-H Program, a leader with the Granby 4-H Club, a member of the NASA Network of Astronaut Teachers (NEAT), and a candidate for commercial space flight through Teachers in Space, Inc. In 2019, Manzer received the UConn College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR) 4-H Leadership Award, and was recently selected as the 2021 Northeast 4-H Volunteer of the Year Award.

Neag School assistant professor of learning sciences, Ido Davidesco, has received a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a month-long computational thinking unit in high school biology classes. Davidesco will work with Neag School colleagues Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead, Christopher Rhoads, and John Settlage, as well as Aaron Kyle from Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Kiana Foster-Mauro’s mother, grandmother and great-grandmother watched with the 22-year-old elementary education major as she became the first in her family to graduate college. Nadeige Bailey, another first-generation graduate, said she cried on her couch last May as she watched her name flash across her computer screen “for like two seconds.” That was the culmination of her two-year, sports management graduate program.

At Connecticut’s State Education Resource Center (SERC) Dismantling Systemic Racism conference, West Hartford Public Schools Director of Equity Advancement Roszena Haskins was honored with the 2021 George Coleman Excellence in Equity award for her successful and ongoing district-wide work.

.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona praised new University of Connecticut graduates for their work in helping to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and urged them to use their uniqueness as their “superpower” to accomplish their career and life goals, in a recorded speech played Saturday at a virtual 2021 commencement. Cardona, Connecticut’s former education commissioner who earned graduate degrees at UConn, taped the speech Friday at UConn’s football stadium in East Hartford, the site of Saturday’s ceremony. The school awarded nearly 8,200 degrees.