Nathaly Santos is a doctoral student within the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster at the Berkeley School of Education. Her broad research interests include equity and justice in higher education through an organizational lens, with a more specific focus on the Latinx student experience and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs).
These days, Nathaly is interested in exploring how individual and institutional factors can affect Latinx and minoritized student outcomes, as well as how those factors influence systemic policies and practices that seek to advance student success rates...
Bruce Fuller, a sociologist, delves into how institutions, large and small, attempt to lift the learning and growth of children, including why they often fall short.
This implicates surrounding ideologies and politics that move organizations to do better. His new book -- When Schools Work-- delves into why student achievement climbed for nearly two decades in Los Angeles, and how a colorful quilt of civic activists powered a variety of reforms. The...
Enrique Valencia López is a PhD student in the Policy, Politics and Leadership cluster at the School of Education. His research interests relate to three broad areas: the stratification of education by gender, immigration status and ethnicity; the measurement of teacher working conditions and well-being; and education in Latin America.
Before coming to Berkeley, Enrique worked for Mexico’s National Institute for Educational Evaluation and Assessment (INEE) in both the Policy and Indicators area. During that time, he co-authored Mexico’s first report on the...
María Rojas is a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Education. She earned her bachelor’s degree in social communications from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and worked as a journalist for international affairs at CNN Chile. María immersed herself in the realm of education when she served as a Spanish Language Arts teacher in a public high school in Santiago. Subsequently, María ventured to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Master’s in Education Policy at the University of Washington, Seattle. María’s research interests lie at the intersection of...
Ja’Nya is a second year PhD student in the Education Policy, Politics and Leadership cluster. She is a proud East Coast native, raised in the “DMV”: DC, Maryland, Virginia region. She started her career as a Special Education Teacher and case manager, eventually transitioning into roles around youth mentorship, and race and identity facilitation for educators.
As a practitioner and researcher she is interested in understanding communal ties amongst school based stakeholders (parents, students and teachers) during the plight of policy shifts. She looks at opportunities for shift in...
Derek Van Rheenen’s research interests include the cultural studies of sport, nature sports, sport tourism, ecopedagogy, the connections between sports, learning and schooling, and the role of intercollegiate athletics in the American university system. A former Academic All-American and professional soccer player, Van Rheenen teaches courses on sport, culture, and education. In 1998 he received the Outstanding Dissertation Award in the School of Education, UC Berkeley. Professor Van Rheenen has also been named a Chancellor's Public Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley....
Judith Warren Little's research interests center on the organizational and occupational contexts of teaching, with special attention to teachers' collegial relationships and to the contexts, policies, and practices of teachers' professional development. In pursuing these interests, she attempts to balance attention to the daily life of schools and locally situated meanings, identities, and relationships with a broader view of the social, institutional, and policy environments in which the work of teaching resides.
Note: Although I remain active in research and mentoring, I have...
Emily Reich (she/her) is a first-year doctoral student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster in the School of Education. She comes to graduate school with questions about the ways in which bureaucracy and the school staff who wield it shape the educational lives of marginalized and minitoritized students.
Emily received a BS in Special Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010. She holds credentials to teach Special Education to students in kindergarten through age twenty-one in California and Wisconsin. Before coming to Berkeley, Emily spent many...
Eric Assan (He/Him) is a 1st year Master's degree student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster in the School of Education. He is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Applied Data Science. He is an awardee of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, a fully funded scholarship program for African students and the first Education student to be awarded this scholarship. Prior to joining the BSE, Eric received an MEd in Educational Management from Huzhou University, China in 2022 and graduated with a Bachelor's of Social Sciences Education at the University of Cape Coast...
Hoyun Kim is a PhD student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster at the School of Education. Her research interests lie in the experiences of students in higher education and examining postsecondary institutions as organizations: topics pertaining to student agency, equity, accessibility of higher education, and the behavior and incentives of postsecondary institutions. More broadly, she aims to understand and reason the purpose and power of higher education through her work.
Her interests are informed by her experiences attending different forms of public schools in the...