Dr. Ragusa is a professor at the University of Southern California (USC) in the Viterbi School of Engineering’s Division of Engineering Education. She chairs USC’s STEM Education and Research Consortium. Her research interests and areas of expertise include: engineering education, college access, STEM mentorship, STEM teacher education and retention, literacy education, content literacy, early childhood, special education and deaf education as well as assessment and measurement in STEM education.
She teaches courses in research design, measurement theory, critical pedagogy in STEM and courses in learning and instructional theory. She has extensive expertise in assessment, psychometrics, advanced quantitative analyses, and multimodal research design.
Prior to joining USC, Dr. Ragusa held an appointment as an assistant professor in special education and bilingual education at California State University, Northridge in addition to a faculty position at Pacific Oaks College.
She is active in many professional associations in engineering education. She has been the principal investigator on several federal grants through the US Department of Education, the National Institute of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
