About

My work in education has moved across classrooms, teacher education, public service, and research, but has remained grounded in a consistent set of questions about how educational institutions shape the experiences of students, families, and communities and how those institutions might be transformed.

I am a doctoral candidate at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education, where I study race and inequality in PK–12 education. My research examines how educational institutions produce, sustain, and respond to racial harm, with particular attention to school discipline, organizational processes, and the experiences of students and communities navigating institutional inequities. I am especially interested in how schools understand and respond to racial harm, and what meaningful organizational change requires.

My scholarship is informed by nearly fifteen years of experience as a Spanish-bilingual elementary school teacher in San Francisco public schools, as well as my work in teacher education and educational leadership. These experiences have shaped my understanding of the relationships among classroom practice, institutional structures, educational policy, and the everyday lives of students and families. They also inform my commitment to research that takes educators' knowledge and communities' experiences seriously.

I also served as an elected member of the San Francisco Board of Education, including two terms as Board President. Serving in public office offered a different vantage point on the possibilities and constraints of educational change, particularly the complex relationships among policy decisions, institutional practices, and the communities schools serve. My experiences in educational governance continue to inform the questions I bring to my research.

At Stanford, I have also helped build spaces for scholarly exchange, collaboration, and public engagement. I am affiliated with the Black Academic Development Lab, and through my work as Op-Eds Editor with the Public Scholarship Collaborative, I have helped create opportunities for researchers to communicate their work beyond academic audiences, supported through Stanford GSE's Collaborative Learning Fund. I have also helped lead the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) Conference and SWAYWO, the Graduate School of Education's student-led research conference, which brings graduate students together to share developing research, exchange ideas, and build intellectual community.

Across my work, I connect scholarship, teaching, and public engagement. I approach educational research not only as a way to understand how inequities are produced and sustained, but also as an opportunity to examine how institutions learn, how communities advocate for change, and how schools might become more responsive to the students and families they serve.

Beyond these professional roles, I am also a mother, an experience that continues to shape how I think about education, community, and the futures we imagine for children.