Honeiah Karimi

Honeiah Karimi, a doctoral student in the Department of Education at the Gevirtz School, has been selected as the recipient of the 2021 Louis H. Towbes Fellowship.

The late Mr. Michael Towbes, local businessman, philanthropist, and former chair of The UCSB Foundation, established this fellowship in his father’s name in 1986 as a means of recognizing an academically exceptional first-year graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Honeiah Karimi is a doctoral student in Education with an emphasis in Cognitive Science. She is under the advisement of Dr. Andrew Maul and Dr. Diana Arya. Her research focuses on how virtual reality can be used for literacy instruction and second language learning. She received her B.A. in Linguistics from UC Riverside and her M.A. in Linguistics with a specialization in Language and Mind from Cal State Fullerton. Currently, Karimi is the Program Task Designer and Linguistic Analyst for the UCSB Virtual Reality Project as part of the Community-Based Literacies (CBL) Initiative.