Dear Colleagues,
The CPTSC Executive Committee is pleased to announce this year’s Diversity Scholarship Award winners: Asmita Ghimire ($1,000), Ernestina Akorfa Akorli ($500), and Thais Rodrigues Cons ($500)! This recognition honors their dedication, excellence, and commitment to diversity within the field of technical and scientific communication. We look forward to learning more about their work at the 2025 CPTSC conference in Lubbock, TX.
Asmita Ghimire (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Scientific, and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research focuses on international and transnational technical communication, artificial intelligence and generative AI, and global public policy. Through transnational feminist thinking, methods, and methodologies, her work reflects a strong commitment to advancing social justice in global and international technical communication.
Ernestina Akorfa Akorli (she/her) is an international student from Ghana, West Africa, pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric, Writing, and Professional Communication at East Carolina University. As a scholar and teacher, her research is grounded in a commitment to promoting ethical, inclusive, and innovative technical and scientific communication, affirming contemporary digital feminist practices and literacies on social media, and advocating for socially just AI policies and pedagogy. Her work also seeks to liberate rhetorical and pedagogical practices within the African context through decolonial approaches that advance our field’s diversity in inclusive research.
Thais Rodrigues Cons (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Her research examines the intersection of language justice and technical writing in higher education, with a focus on how writers in the Global South navigate bureaucratic genres. She collaborates with public institutions in Brazil and leads a project on editais (official public calls for funding, admissions, and employment), conceptualizing their redesign and questioning Brazil’s plain language policy through participatory methodologies. Her work contributes to transnational conversations in socially just documentation and TPC pedagogy, legal literacies, and institutional communication in Latin America. Thais has a background in translation, writing centers, and applied linguistics, and has received multiple honors, including the Cs Scholars for the Dream Award, the CPTSC Graduate Student Research Award, and the Hawisher & Selfe Caring for the Future Award.
Congratulations to Asmita, Ernestina, and Thais on this well-earned honor! Thank you to the CPTSC Diversity Committee reviewers for your support.
Nora K. Rivera
CPTSC Diversity Committee Chair