UC doctoral student shares his journey with Spectrum News

For Amota Ataneka the distance traveled for education and opportunity has been impressive and life altering.

He grew up in Kiribati, an island nation in the central Pacific Ocean more than 7,000 miles from Cincinnati. One of six children, Ataneka remembers a simple childhood filled with outdoor adventures, helping his family collect coconut sap and developing a love for reading. He shared his story with Spectrum News.

Kiribati is made up of 33 atolls and spans a vast area in the equatorial Pacific of nearly 4,000 kilometers from east to west and more than 2,000 kilometers from north to south. It’s recognized as one of the smallest and least developed economies globally. Life on Nikanau is defined by subsistence activities, primarily fishing and collecting coconuts.

And while the capital island features some modern amenities, Ataneka wasn’t exposed to many technological advancements as a kid—though what he could access made an indelible impact. 

Today he is a doctoral student in UC’s School of Education completing his dissertation, “Causal Machine Learning with Reflective Latent Variables: A Latent Deep & Targeted Learning (LDTL) Architecture.”  

It’s also what’s earned him the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, a prestigious award given to 35 emerging scholars across the nation. The fellowship recognizes doctoral candidates whose research has the potential to make significant contributions to education.

Ataneka recounted his journey from Kiribati to studying economics at the University of Queensland in Australia and completing a master’s in public administration at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and finishing his doctorate at the University of Cincinnati with Spectrum News journalist Javari Burnett. 

For Ataneka, his Spencer fellowship is about more than his own success.

"It means more than me because now people from back home can say, 'You can go there and achieve something like that? That means we can really do this,'" Ataneka told Spectrum News.

Anna Dejarnette, director of UC's School of Education, told Spectrum News that Ataneka's research uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to better understand educational connections that could influence future teaching and learning.

"He's leveraging the potential of AI and the potential of machine learning," Dejarnette told Spectrum News. "He's doing it in really careful ways to actually help us understand connections between phenomena rather than just noticing patterns."

She said Ataneka's perseverance serves as an example of what determination and opportunity can accomplish.

"It's beautiful to have an example of someone who has kept in pursuit of this goal and is now already starting to see the fruits of all of that labor," Dejarnette told Spectrum News.

View the Spectrum News segment online.

Learn more about Amota Ataneka in UC’s College of Education, Criminal Justice, Human Services and Information Technology.

Featured photo of Spectrum News journalist Javari Burnett interviewing UC student Amota Ataneka.  Photo provided.