Hi everyone! My name is Violetta Soboleva, and I am joining the Futures Initiative this year as an Institutional Leadership Specialist. I’m originally from Russia, where I began my career as an elementary school teacher and English tutor. I later came to the United States as a Fulbright Fellow to pursue a master’s degree in Instructional Design at Syracuse University. After graduating, I spent over a year working as an instructional designer at Syracuse University’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment, where I became especially interested in the ways research, technology, and design can come together to make education more accessible and effective.
In 2023, I joined the CUNY Graduate Center as a Ph.D. student in Educational Psychology. My research focuses on civic and political development under conditions of political repression, war, and displacement, particularly among young people from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. My dissertation explores how people understand political responsibility when more conventional forms of political participation may be constrained or unsafe. Alongside my doctoral work, I teach Human Development and have been involved in research at the intersection of technology and education, including projects examining learning and emotional experiences in Virtual Reality.
A theme that has followed me throughout my career is an interest in connecting academic work with practical and public-facing projects. I enjoy finding ways to make research more public to make ideas more engaging and accessible beyond academic spaces. During an internship at the Vera Institute of Justice, I worked on policy analysis related to immigration detention and efforts to improve conditions for detained immigrants. In 2024, I also founded a nonprofit organization that supports displaced Russian students navigating the U.S. immigration system, which has given me another opportunity to translate research, advocacy, and access to information into concrete support for a community directly affected by immigration policy.
That is one of the reasons I’m especially excited to join the Futures Initiative. I’m looking forward to contributing my research, design, and communication skills to a community that approaches higher education as something that can be made more equitable, collaborative, and responsive to the people it serves. I’m also excited to learn more about the work that goes into building and sustaining initiatives like this from the inside—and to see where my combination of skills and experience might be useful.
P.S. On a side note, if you want to collaborate on a music project, I play the piano, sing, and write dark wave/rock music 🙂 My favorite band is Nine Inch Nails as a point of reference what kind of music inspires me!
