SoLAR Awards

Dr. Renzhe Yu is an Assistant Professor of Learning Analytics / Educational Data Mining at Teachers College, Columbia University, a Research Affiliate at Community College Research Center, and a Faculty Member of Data Science Institute. He received his doctorate from UC Irvine and a master’s degree and two bachelor’s degrees from Peking University. These degrees span education, public policy, computer science, and economics.

His research interests include learning analytics, higher education, applied data science, computational social science, and responsible AI. At the core of his research agenda is equity-oriented educational data science, which investigates how emerging data science techniques can help understand and improve educational and social equity. He has won best paper awards at international conferences on education and data science and received Data Science for Social Good fellowships from the Alan Turing Institute and IBM Research. He was also named David P. Gardner Fellow at UC Berkeley and Public Impact Fellow at UC Irvine.

You can find out more about his research here and view a full list of publications here.

Mohammed Saqr is an Academy of Finland researcher who leads the lab of learning analytics at University of Eastern Finland, School of Computing which was, according to Scopus, Europe’s most productive learning analytics lab during the last five years (2019-2023) according to Scopus. Mohammed had a PhD in learning analytics from Stockholm University, Sweden, before joining UEF in Finland, Mohammed had a postdoc at University of Paris, France, and holds the title of Docent in learning analytics from the University of Oulu, Finland. Mohammed’s research is interdisciplinary including learning analytics, AI, big data, network science, science of science and medicine. Mohammed has several awards, e.g., the PhD was awarded the best thesis, he also got several international research awards (e.g., best papers), obtained the University of Michigan Office of Academic Innovation fellowship. In 2023, the Society of Learning Analytics Research (SOLAR) awarded Mohammed Europe Emerging Scholar Award for the "noteworthy research leading to significant knowledge and understanding of learning analytics and the impact of research on learning analytics application, adoption, and professional development in Europe. Mohammed obtained funding from prestigious institutions: Academy of Finland (as PI) for Idiographic learning analytic and Swedish Research Council (as Co-PI) as well as several other grants. Mohammed is on the editorial board of several prestigious academic journals e.g., Transactions of Learning Technologies, British journal of Education Technologies and Plos One. Mohammed also organised and contributed to several international conferences and presented several invited keynotes. Mohammed’s current collaboration network includes Finland, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Serbia,Australia, France, Switzerland, UK, and USA and The Netherlands.

To find out more about Mohammad, please visit his website: https://saqr.me/

Yizhou Fan is an Assistant Professor and Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Education, Peking University since February 2023, and before that, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He is also an adjunct researcher at the Centre for Learning Analytics Monash, Monash University. Yizhou considers himself a learning analyst using computational methods to advance the understanding of online learning strategies and self-regulated learning. His research interests are MOOC, self-regulated learning, learning design, learning tactics and strategies, and multimodal learning analytics. His recent research agenda lies in the development of personalised metacognitive scaffoldings to assist learners in better cooperating with artificial intelligence (such as ChatGPT) to learn and complete challenging tasks. In the past five years, he has published more than a dozen articles in top-tier and peer-reviewed international journals (e.g., Computers & Education, Metacognition and Learning, and Journal of Computer Assisted Learning) and conference proceedings such as the International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK). Yizhou has been strongly embedded into the international research community through his service role on the Communication Committee of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) and as the Publicity Chair for LAK22 and ECTEL22. He has also received several rewards such as Excellent Dissertation Award for Educational Research in China (2019), National Excellent MOOC Award in China (2017, 2019) and Emerging Scholar Award (2023).