Rocío Díaz Cerda is a PhD student in Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research sits at the intersection of gender, school culture, and educational inequality, with a focus on how young people navigate and experience school life in relation to prevailing gender norms. She is particularly interested in how educational policies and institutional practices shape those norms, and in what it would take for schools to become genuinely safer and more inclusive spaces for all students.
Her work draws on qualitative methodologies and engages with comparative and international perspectives, exploring how gender and education intersect across different national and cultural contexts in ways that both reproduce and challenge inequality. Underlying this research is a broader commitment to understanding how schools can be sites of social change, and what role policy and institutional reform can play in that process.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, Rocío spent seven years researching educational policy across various research centers and universities in Chile. She later joined Chile's Secretary of Education, where she coordinated a research center and led initiatives aimed at informing public policy on education and social equity. Her work included collaboration with international organizations. She has published on issues related to gender and education, policy and leadership in education, and school reforms.
