Dr. Xiaohan Yang Zhu joined Texas A&M University in Fall 2025 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture. Dr. Zhu brings a passion for understanding how families, especially transnational, multilingual, and multigenerational families, create rich learning environments for young children, even when traditional systems struggle to see or value what families are already doing.

At Texas A&M, Dr. Zhu is establishing the CIRCLE Lab (Community-Informed Research on Children's Learning Ecologies), where she studies the ways grandparents, parents, and children build learning together across generations, languages, and digital spaces. Her research asks a simple but powerful question: How do we honor what families already know? Through community-informed methods, she partners with families as collaborators rather than simply research subjects, working to change how early childhood education recognizes the strengths of families of multicultural and multilingual backgrounds.

Dr. Zhu is equally passionate about preparing the next generation of early childhood educators, helping future teachers develop the reflective thinking and cultural awareness needed to truly partner with all families they will serve. She looks forward to mentoring graduate students in meaningful, community-centered research as CIRCLE Lab grows.