Thomas Gennen is a post-doctoral researcher in learning sciences at the Berkeley School of Education (UC Berkeley) and a research fellow at the Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning, and Education (CANDLE Lab, University of Southern California). He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Sciences, with master’s degrees in both philosophy and anthropology of education.

His current research examines the conceptual changes fostered by a new high-school-level physics curriculum designed from the Knowledge-in-Pieces (KiP) perspective on learning, using fine-grained knowledge analysis and microgenetic methods. The project is conducted in collaboration with Andrea diSessa, founder of KiP, and the CANDLE Lab.

He has also developed an analytical framework that traces how distinct epistemological assumptions shape competing educational theories and pedagogical approaches, and how these differences impact student learning. He has applied this framework to central debates in education and the learning sciences, including competing theories of conceptual change, the instructivist–constructivist debate, the influence of assumptions about the nature of concepts on educational theory, the legacy of empiricism in contemporary education, and the relationship between teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their practices.

Thomas is the recipient of several awards, including the 2025 Jean Piaget Society Dissertation Prize and the 2025 AERA Cultural-Historical SIG Graduate Student Award for his work on conceptual change and its relation to developmental education.