Mayada Alhashem

Researcher, Engineer and Data Scientist

Mayada Alhashem holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from UC Santa Barbara, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from KAUST, a Master of Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley and a Graduate Certificate in Human Development and Learning from Ball State University, and she works as an engineer at Saudi Aramco. Her main interest is educational technology that promotes understanding of child development from a cognitive and developmental standpoint. Through her graduate studies at Ball State she explored social and emotional development across cultures, particularly how collectivist support systems build stronger foundations for children’s resilience, drawing on research on Palestinian children’s resilience through shared identity, on Japanese and Chinese community norms that support emotional regulation, and on her own upbringing in Saudi Arabia with extended-family guidance. This work led her to develop the village model, a framework showing that children thrive when surrounded by consistent values, communal support and shared identity, and she advocates rebuilding these support systems in modern contexts.