Psychology Prof. Almaz Mesghina received Northwestern’s 2025 Daniel I. Linzer Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Equity earlier this year. The award celebrates individuals or groups who work to build a sense of belonging at the University.
Mesghina has been an assistant professor of instruction in the psychology department since 2021. She also leads workshops for first-year students in the Warren Summer Bridge Program, NU’s pre-college transitional program that teaches skills for college life.
Mesghina’s research focuses on educational psychology and how psychology affects learning in the classroom.
The Daily spoke to Mesghina about her recent accolade as well as her research and tenure at NU more generally.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: What did it mean for you, both personally and professionally, to receive this award so early in your career?
Mesghina: Oh, that was a surprise. Actually, I was very honored to get it, so early on and so early in my time with being here at Northwestern.
At a time when we were all a little bit concerned — and still are a little bit concerned — about DEI and what that means on campus, just to receive that at that moment was a really good opportunity for me and the faculty, friends and colleagues that I’ve worked on with all these projects and the students I support. It was actually kind of a celebratory moment at a kind of dark point, so the awards reception was truly one of the professional highlights of my career.
The Daily: What drew you initially to academia and working at a school like NU?
Mesghina: I was very hardcore pre-med when I was in college. And I think the only reason that I was pre-med was because I wanted to help people — that was the most attractive thing to me. I ended up deciding not to do it, and I ended up studying psychology … So, when I started researching in grad school, I was really interested in understanding student learning. What are the contextual factors to support student learning? I was just interested in deep understanding of deep contextual factors that influence people’s learning understanding in real contexts. Helping people, I feel like, can be as simple as applying your research understanding to addressing inequities in learning and education.
The Daily: I saw that you try to expose students to content from overlooked perspectives and voices, especially in the psychology field. How do you find those perspectives? How do you decide which voices to include?
Mesghina: You basically can start a lot of these by thinking about the biggest issues in the field. So, we have a replication crisis in psychology where every time you repeat a study, sometimes studies are not finding the same thing over and over again. Instead of pointing this out as an issue of, “Oh, research is bad,” it actually draws attention to how much more important it is to do careful research.
A lot of the reasons that these studies are not replicating over time is because you have different people, different mindsets, different context, different cultures. So a lot of it is just starting from some of the issues and known limitations about our field, about our tools. And then from there, this is something I’ve been studying for a while now, I’m in contact with people who are doing research that just kind of asks ‘What happens if you apply this to a culture? What happens if you ask this question in a different way?’
The Daily: Do you have a lot of time to engage with research since you’re also teaching?
Mesghina: I do, yeah, actually I think it’s one of the pros of the job. So I do maintain an active research program … I’m really focused on undergrad student learning and the factors that complicate and that promote performance pressure and anxiety. As a professor, I’ve been able to think about these questions more deeply and study my students.
The Daily: How do you implement what you learned from that into the classroom?
Mesghina: So what I do in the classroom, it’s a very interesting place to kind of tinker and test with a lot of the interventions I’ve been studying.
I used to study emotion regulation. So like, how do you help somebody regulate their emotions at times when they’re feeling high anxiety pressure? But I’ve moved towards thinking more about how do instructors set up the learning environment in a way that can promote students’ learning, despite of, or because of, the very understandable anxiety or pressure feelings that are high?
So some of it’s just been me over the course of my years, trying out different things that I’ve been reading about in the literature, and then starting to kind of more systematically implement them and measuring changes to students’ feelings and performance across the course, and they’re slowly getting published and analyzed, so very promising stuff.
Email: lucyvanmeir2029@u.northwestern.edu
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