April Ursula Fox, Ph.D., is the research development lead specialist in the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects at UNLV’s College of Education. Her expertise spans strategic research development and research administration, including funding landscape analysis, opportunity matching, project conceptualization, proposal design, competitive funding strategy, faculty development, and research portfolio infrastructure. Since joining the college in 2022, she has directly contributed to securing more than $50 million in grant funding across research, scholarship, service, and community-engaged initiatives. She has also developed grant education resources, professional workshops, reusable proposal-development tools, and data-management systems that support faculty and research teams throughout the grant lifecycle.

Fox is a member of the Society of Research Administrators International (SRAI), where she presented the Grant Proposition Canvas, a visual framework she developed to support collaborative project conceptualization and competitive proposal design. Her professional presentations also include topics such as artificial intelligence in grantmaking and building teams in research funding. She has served as a reviewer for National Science Foundation grant proposals, American Educational Research Association research proposals, and UNLV grants and sponsored projects.

Alongside her research development work, Fox teaches educational psychology, research methods, cognitive development, and grant writing. Her teaching emphasizes active learning, student agency, reflection, multimodal expression, and the meaningful application of theory to practice. She has served as instructor of record for undergraduate educational psychology courses and has contributed instruction to graduate courses in mixed methods research, cognitive development, and grant writing. In recognition of her teaching, Fox was named the 2025–2026 first-place recipient of the university-wide UNLV Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award, after also receiving first-place recognition from the College of Education. Her teaching scholarship has been presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, the UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo, and other academic and professional venues.

As an educational psychology and mixed methods researcher, Fox examines learning as an embodied, relational, performatic, and culturally mediated process. Working across educational psychology, informal learning, creative pedagogy, and mixed methods inquiry, she studies how agency, experiential knowing, multimodal expression, and epistemic authorship shape learning in museums, classrooms, community settings, and creative workshops. Her doctoral research developed the Performatic Learning Framework, which conceptualizes learning through three interrelated constructs: Intentional Epistemic Claiming, Experiential Knowing, and Cultural Mediation.

Zine-making serves as a central site of inquiry within Fox’s scholarship. Her research investigates zines as tools for museum learning, conceptual synthesis, reflection, cultural mediation, multimodal authorship, and learner-centered assessment. She is the co-author of the peer-reviewed article “From Visitor to Author: How Visitor-Created Zine Artifacts Promote Meaningful, Multimodal and Culturally Mediated Learning in Science Museums,” published in the Journal of Museum Education. She has presented her research at multiple American Educational Research Association annual meetings and other interdisciplinary research and education conferences. Her broader scholarly interests include mixed methods integration, experiential learning, metacognition, epistemic agency, self-coherence, artificial intelligence and learning, and the affective dimensions of cognition.

Fox holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Educational Psychology, as well as an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Mixed Methods Research, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her interdisciplinary background also includes business administration, analytics, publishing, design, and the arts. She is the author of Social Media Analytics Strategy: Using Data to Optimize Business Performance and has published creative works across fiction, poetry, collaborative storytelling, and zines. Across her research development, teaching, scholarship, and creative practice, her work is united by an interest in how people build knowledge, claim authorship, and transform experience into meaningful action.