She earned a Ph.D. in the learning sciences from Northwestern University in 2008 and was a Doctoral Fellow with the NSF-funded Center for Curriculum Materials in Science (2003-2008). Berland is broadly interested in facilitating and studying students as they engage in complex communication practices. She is currently focused on exploring the dynamics of how and why students are able (or unable) to productively communicate in engineering classrooms, in the context of UTeachEngineering high school classrooms.