Romania: Culture, Identity, and Heritage – April Fourth Friday

The Valparaiso International Center’s April 2025 Fourth Friday event featured a special presentation by Ana-Maria Haiduc, a local educator and PhD candidate in mathematics education.

Ana-Maria shared the rich cultural tapestry of Romania and the personal stories that have shaped her identity.

Ana-Maria and her husband, Ovidiu, have lived in Valparaiso since 2009 with their children, Emily and Fabio. Originally from Romania, Ana-Maria began her teaching career in her home country and continued it in the United States after earning her American teaching license. She has since worked as a mathematics teacher across Northwest Indiana, including in South Bend, Portage, and Valparaiso. While teaching full-time, she earned a Master of Science in Mathematics from Purdue University in 2017 and is currently completing her PhD in mathematics education. Her dissertation research focuses on teachers’ planning reasoning and the application of care theory in education. Today, she serves as a mathematics interventionist at Chesterton High School and as a mathematics instructor at Purdue University Northwest.

In her free time, Ana-Maria enjoys playing the mandolin, learning languages such as Spanish, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Italian, and refreshing her German skills, which she originally learned during Romania’s communist era. When the weather allows, she loves spending time gardening. Her husband, Ovidiu, works as a shift manager at Cleveland-Cliffs in Gary and earned his degree in metallurgy from the Polytechnical University in Bucharest. He came to the United States after winning the Green Card Lottery in 1995.