{"id":223614,"date":"2025-01-28T08:00:55","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T13:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=223614"},"modified":"2025-04-29T15:52:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T19:52:08","slug":"engineering-professor-earns-nations-highest-honor-for-early-career-scientists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/01\/engineering-professor-earns-nations-highest-honor-for-early-career-scientists\/","title":{"rendered":"Engineering Professor Earns Nation\u2019s Highest Honor for Early-Career Scientists"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Jan. 14, UConn civil engineering Professor Arash E. Zaghi was among nearly 400 individuals honored by President Biden with the <\/span>Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)<\/span><\/a>. This is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers who are in the early phases of their careers.<\/span> Jill Wegrzyn, an associate professor in the UConn Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, also received this award.<\/span><\/p>\n

Established by President Clinton in 1996, PECASE recognizes scientists and engineers who show exceptional potential for leadership early in their research careers. The award recognizes innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Zaghi, who joined the UConn faculty in 2011, is a professor in the College of Engineering. At the beginning of his career, his research focused primarily on bridge design and resilience against earthquakes and other disasters.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But after his diagnosis with dyslexia and ADHD at age 32, he knew he wanted to get involved with supporting neurodiverse learners. Building on his own experience, Zaghi quickly identified a major problem with mainstream narratives of neurodiversity.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy diagnosis opened my eyes to the unique strengths often overlooked in individuals like myself,\u201d Zaghi says. \u201cAs I delved into the literature, I discovered mixed perspectives. Some studies suggest that people with ADHD tend to be more creative and willing to take risks. These are precisely the skills we need to address the complex, large-scale challenges of our time. This realization sparked my commitment to redefining neurodiversity as a strength and to creating environments where diverse ways of thinking are celebrated and harnessed for innovation.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, Zaghi\u2019s work specifically centers on countering the \u201cdeficit\u201d model of neurodiversity, which focuses on the challenges neurodiverse students face in traditional learning environments and promoting the \u201cstrengths-based\u201d model. Instead of regarding neurodiversity as a problem to be solved, this model encourages the view of neurodiversity as a unique strength. For example, research (including Zaghi\u2019s own) has suggested that neurodiverse students tend to excel in areas such as creativity, pattern-recognition, and problem-solving. Many also demonstrate higher than average academic ability.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My diagnosis opened my eyes to the unique strengths often overlooked in individuals like myself.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These are all the qualities, Zaghi thinks, that the fields of engineering \u2013 and science more broadly \u2013 should be embracing and actively recruiting.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The National Science Foundation (NSF) agrees. In 2017, Zaghi was awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER Award for his project \u201c<\/span>Promoting Engineering Innovation through Increased Neurodiversity by Encouraging the Participation of Students with ADHD<\/span><\/a>.\u201d In 2021, he followed it with an NSF Mid-Career Advancement award for a project using <\/span>artificial intelligence to develop personalized assistive tools<\/span><\/a> to enhance the participation of neurodiverse students in STEM education.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Zaghi\u2019s latest honor, the PECASE, is another national recognition of the powerful potential of his work. It is the crowning jewel of a research career studded with similar accolades, most relating to promoting neurodiverse learning through a strengths-based approach.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe are very proud of Prof. Arash Zaghi for winning this presidential award and for his pioneering research in supporting neurodiverse students to improve their learning outcome and future careers,\u201d says JC Zhao, Dean of the UConn College of Engineering. \u201cArash\u2019s research and outreach will shift the paradigm and also bring visibility to a generally misunderstood group of students who can be as successful as Arash himself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout this career, Zaghi has been able to steadily expand the breadth of his work in supporting neurodiverse education. His earliest projects in this realm had a very specific focus \u2013 for example, supporting students with ADHD in engineering.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Over time, and thanks to collaborations with other researchers at UConn and elsewhere, Zaghi\u2019s focus was able to grow beyond engineering to include STEM as a whole. It has also grown to include other types of neurodiversity, like dyslexia and autism, and address different age groups, from K-12 learners to graduate students.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With UConn neuroscientist Fumiko Hoeft, Zaghi is co-PI on the <\/span>TRANSdisciplinary Convergence in Educational Neuroscience Doctoral (TRANSCEND) training program,<\/span><\/a> an interdisciplinary training program devoted to rethinking educational neuroscience. He is also the co-PI on the <\/span>UConn INCLUDE project,<\/span><\/a> which supports neurodiversity in the College of Engineering.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The recognition for his work as a champion of neurodiversity is gratifying, Zaghi says, but he can remember a time just ten years ago when the idea of a strengths-based approach was considered \u201cso radical.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When he submitted his first proposal to the NSF, Zaghi recalls, he was told, \u201cThis is so far out of the mainstream that I have no idea how the panel is going to react.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe were extremely fortunate that the NSF invested in us,\u201d he says. \u201cI think that\u2019s a great story of how bold research pays off. The NSF is there to support high-risk, high-payoff research, and they supported that \u2018crazy idea.\u2019 Now, here we are \u2013 with the amount of visibility, I think we have substantially contributed to changing the narrative from a deficit perspective to a strengths-based one.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Biden named Arash E. Zaghi, an engineering professor with a passion for supporting neurodiverse learners, as a PECASE recipient<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":175,"featured_media":223804,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2275,2429,1866,2460,156,2648,2076,2234],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2413],"class_list":["post-223614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-affairs","category-awards-scholarships","category-engr","category-faculty","category-profile","category-blue-research","category-research","category-university-life"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-05 17:25:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223614"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223654,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223614\/revisions\/223654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/223804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223614"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=223614"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=223614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}