On Jan. 14, UConn civil engineering Professor Arash E. Zaghi was among nearly 400 individuals honored by President Biden with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). 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. Jill Wegrzyn, an associate professor in the UConn Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, also received this award.
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.
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.
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.
“My diagnosis opened my eyes to the unique strengths often overlooked in individuals like myself,” Zaghi says. “As 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.”
Now, Zaghi’s work specifically centers on countering the “deficit” model of neurodiversity, which focuses on the challenges neurodiverse students face in traditional learning environments and promoting the “strengths-based” 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’s 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.
My diagnosis opened my eyes to the unique strengths often overlooked in individuals like myself.
These are all the qualities, Zaghi thinks, that the fields of engineering – and science more broadly – should be embracing and actively recruiting.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) agrees. In 2017, Zaghi was awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER Award for his project “Promoting Engineering Innovation through Increased Neurodiversity by Encouraging the Participation of Students with ADHD.” In 2021, he followed it with an NSF Mid-Career Advancement award for a project using artificial intelligence to develop personalized assistive tools to enhance the participation of neurodiverse students in STEM education.
Zaghi’s 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.
“We 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,” says JC Zhao, Dean of the UConn College of Engineering. “Arash’s 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.”
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 – for example, supporting students with ADHD in engineering.
Over time, and thanks to collaborations with other researchers at UConn and elsewhere, Zaghi’s 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.
With UConn neuroscientist Fumiko Hoeft, Zaghi is co-PI on the TRANSdisciplinary Convergence in Educational Neuroscience Doctoral (TRANSCEND) training program, an interdisciplinary training program devoted to rethinking educational neuroscience. He is also the co-PI on the UConn INCLUDE project, which supports neurodiversity in the College of Engineering.
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 “so radical.”
When he submitted his first proposal to the NSF, Zaghi recalls, he was told, “This is so far out of the mainstream that I have no idea how the panel is going to react.”
“We were extremely fortunate that the NSF invested in us,” he says. “I think that’s a great story of how bold research pays off. The NSF is there to support high-risk, high-payoff research, and they supported that ‘crazy idea.’ Now, here we are – with the amount of visibility, I think we have substantially contributed to changing the narrative from a deficit perspective to a strengths-based one.”