Margarita Kiryushina, a graduate student at our laboratory, has successfully passed her doctoral candidacy examination—a pivotal milestone in her PhD journey. This achievement marks a significant moment not only for Margarita but also for our laboratory, as she is the first PhD student to undergo this assessment process since the establishment of our research group at the Technion. In Technion, the candidacy exam, conducted approximately one year after beginning doctoral studies, is considered equally important as the final doctoral defense.
For the examination, Margarita prepared and defended a comprehensive research proposal detailing her introduction to the field, preliminary results, and future research plans for her dissertation, “Exploration of the Dynamics of International and National Discourses on STEM Education.” Her research examines educational policy transformations in Israel and Russia over a twenty-year period, focusing on how international organizations such as the OECD, World Bank, and UNESCO influence local educational systems through cooperation, evaluation, and competition mechanisms.
The examination committee included distinguished researchers Prof. Ayelet Baram-Tsabari (Technion), Prof. Kerstin Martens (University of Bremen), Prof. Florian Waldow (Humboldt University in Berlin), and Prof. Eran Tamir (Tel Aviv University).
