University of Notre Dame BIG Lab doctoral candidate Virna Vidal-Menezes has received a 2026 National Academy of Education (NAEd) Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded to early-career scholars whose projects provide innovative insight into the history, theory, analysis, or practice of formal or informal education at the national and international level. Vidal-Menezes is one of only 35 PhD candidates selected nationally from almost 500 applications.
Vidal-Menezes’s research examines how future schooling opportunities shape current educational decisions. Her dissertation explores how increased access to higher education in Brazil can improve returns for low-income students in high school and middle school. The fellowship will support her writing for this last year of her doctoral research.
I'm very excited to be among educational researchers,” Vidal-Menezes says “And I'm always happy when I'm in an education or economics of education space, because that means that they are starting to include more development research. I look forward to contributing to the debate on education from an international perspective and low- and middle-income perspective that have very different challenges.”
Before joining Notre Dame, Virna earned a B.A. and M.A. in Economics at the Federal University of Ceará, in Fortaleza, Brazil, where she was born and raised. After finishing her PhD, Vidal-Menezes hopes to continue researching the intersection of education, labor, and development economics.