Kazemi is originally from Iran, and moved to the US at age 11.[2]
She graduated from Duke University in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in psychology, and became an elementary school teacher in Phoenix, Arizona.
Returning to graduate study in educational psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, she earned a master's degree in 1997 and completed her Ph.D. in 1999. Her dissertation, Teacher Learning within Communities of Practice: Using Students’ Mathematical Thinking to Guide Teacher Inquiry,[3] was supervised by Megan Franke.[2]
Kazemi joined the University of Washington faculty as an assistant professor in 1999.[3] She was named the Geda and Phil Condit Professor in 2014.[4]
Contributions
With Allison Hintz, Kazemi is the author of the book Intentional Talk: How to Structure and Lead Productive Mathematical Discussions (Stenhouse Publishers, 2014).[5]
She has worked with the Renton School District to develop mathematics lesson in which students explain and critique their problem-solving methods with each other.[6] Her paper with another mathematics education specialist and five Renton teachers and coaches describing her work there won the 2014 Distinguished Paper Award of the Washington Educational Research Association.[7]