The Center for Quantitative Cell Biology is starting the year with new staff in key roles.

Alfia Parvez joined the Center in December 2025 as a research software engineer with primary responsibilities as the Center’s GPU programmer. She holds an MS in computer science from the University of Minnesota Duluth and supports the Center’s research goals by developing and optimizing source code for large-scale simulations. Her work focuses on high-performance computing (HPC), distributed systems, and optimization using NVIDIA GPUs (CUDA) across different software to improve performance, scalability, and efficiency. She enjoys interdisciplinary research and has experience accelerating diverse computational pipelines.

 In January the Center added two new external evaluators. They bring extensive experience to provide objective, third-party assessment to ensure project accountability, assess impact (both intellectual merit and broader impacts), and provide actionable feedback for improvement.

Ayesha Boyce is the associate director for strategic partnerships and an associate professor in the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation. She holds a PhD in educational psychology with a program evaluation specialization from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before pursuing her doctorate, she was a research associate for the Arizona Department of Education in the Accountability Division. After earning her PhD, she completed a one-year postdoctoral scholar position with the Illinois STEM Education Initiative. She then joined the University of North Carolina, Greensboro’s Department of Educational Research Methodology from 2015 to 2021 as an assistant professor. 

She also co-directs the STEM Program Evaluation Lab at ASU. Boyce’s scholarship focuses on attending to value stances and issues related to cultural responsiveness within evaluation—especially STEM contexts . She also examines teaching, mentoring, and learning in evaluation. With over 17 years of evaluation experience, she has evaluated more than 70 programs funded by the National Science Foundation, US Department of Education (ED), US Department of Defense (DOD), Howard Hughes Medical Institute, National Institutes of Health, and Spencer and Teagle foundations. She is a 2019 American Evaluation Association Marcia Guttentag Promising New Evaluator Award recipient and a 2019 UNC Greensboro School of Education Distinguished Research Scholar Award recipient. She is a member of the AEA Board of Directors, an affiliate faculty member for the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment, and an Ethics, Values, & Culture Section Co-Editor for the American Journal of Evaluation.

Courtney Stone is an assistant professor of evaluation in the College of Education’s QUERIES Division at Illinois. She is an evaluation practitioner and scholar with her evaluation work focusing primarily on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs funded by NSF, DOD, and ED. Her research agenda centers around validity theory in culturally responsive evaluation. She holds a PhD from Arizona State University.