Distinguished Alumni Alex Vuyk
Alex Vuyk
Dr. Maria Alexandra “Alex” Vuyk (BS 05-Psychology; MS 10-Special Education, Teaching of Gifted) has applied her education to providing better educations for gifted children around the world. She is psychology professor at Catholic University of Our Lady of Assumption in Asuncion, Paraguay. Vuyk founded Paraguay’s first program for gifted students at the Colegio Santa Elena, the Paraguayan Network for Professionals in High Ability, and Aikumby Center for Giftedness and Creativity, the first center focusing on talent development and assessments in Paraguay. She is fluent in nine languages and guides other educators in gifted education internationally.
She received the 2021 Emerging Scholar in Gifted Education Award from the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children, was advisor for the Paraguayan Minister of Health COVID task force and received the ESU Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award, among other awards. Recently, through a task force with the Ministry of Education and Sciences, the first official policy for gifted students (based on sound scientific evidence) was enacted in Paraguay.
She earned master’s and doctoral degrees in counseling psychology from the University of Kansas and received pre-doctoral training at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County in California. Dr. Kenneth Weaver, retired department chair and dean of The Teachers College, was one of two former ESU educators who watched Vuyk evolve into a force for gifted education. Weaver visited Vuyk at the Colegio Santa Elena and remarked that his former student is “truly in a class all her own. … Vuyk is making the world a better place.”
“She was an intellectual even as an undergraduate … and she reset the bar of what is possible for a student to accomplish,” he wrote in a nomination letter. “Dr. Vuyk is changing her nation by providing opportunities for Paraguay’s gifted children.”