Carrie Lou Bloom

Dr. Bloom (formerly Garberoglio) is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at UT Austin. She is the principal investigator for the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes (NDC), a grant funded by the Office of Special Education Programs at $20,000,000 for 5 years. She is the Co-Director of NDC, working in partnership with Tia Ivanko to manage the organization.

Her motivation for her work is deeply personal, and largely driven by the desire to center deaf people in decision-making that makes an impact on everyday lives. Dr. Bloom's work seeks to counter commonly held narratives about deaf people that are built on a deficit perspective. She advocates for examining the deficits within systems, then changing the systems, not the people.

In her work, Dr. Bloom strives to reach a more nuanced understanding of the development of deaf people throughout the life cycle, particularly in the adolescent and young adult period, and how that development is significantly affected by psychosocial factors and systemic barriers. She seeks to provide the field with current and accurate data about deaf people that places outcome data within appropriate contexts, through secondary analyses of large-scale federal datasets.

Her research into the critical transition period after high school for deaf people is also the topic of Shifting the Dialog, Shifting the Culture: Pathways to Successful Postsecondary Outcomes for Deaf Individuals, the critically acclaimed book Dr. Bloom co-authored in 2017 with Dr. Stephanie W. Cawthon, a faculty member in the College of Education. They also co-authored Research in Deaf Education: Contexts, Challenges and Considerations to strengthen the quality and cultural relevance of research in work that involves deaf people.

Dr. Bloom has authored many scholarly publications and numerous technical and evaluation reports, and presents regularly at conferences. She is committed to increasing the accessibility of research for deaf audiences, using American Sign Language (ASL) to translate and disseminate complex academic content. She has also taught research methods and statistics coursework at the University of Northern Colorado.

Dr. Bloom earned two master's degrees, the first in Deaf Education and Deaf Studies from Lamar University, and the second in Program Evaluation from The University of Texas at Austin. She has a PhD in Educational Psychology from The University of Texas at Austin.