Welcome!

I am Research Specialist at the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative (IWERC) at the University of Illinois. Before this position, I joined IWERC as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. At IWERC, I am working on developing the measurement portfolio with a particular interest in assessment of learning and teaching. I also collaborate across projects that evaluate educational policies, interventions and school effectiveness.

I have a PhD in Education from UCLA, where my emphasis area was Social Research Methods specializing in Advance Quantitative Methods and Measurement. Before UCLA, I spent some time as a Visiting Researcher at the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies at UCSD, where I was a 2020-2021 doctoral fellow having the opportunity to share my research and learn from other scholars interested in conducting research in Mexico and Latin America.

I hold a Master of Arts degree in International Comparative Education from Stanford University and Bachelor and Master Degrees in Economics from ITAM in Mexico.

My research interests lie in the intersection between measurement and evaluation of educational policies, in particular those related to teaching quality and evaluation methodologies.

My dissertation was a comparative study of classroom practices in Mathematics in Chile, Colombia and Mexico seeking to understand the ways in which teaching standards and frameworks in each country shape what happens in the classroom. Moreover, I explored how the distribution of teachers (and their classroom practices) varies by student, families, teachers and school characteristics.

I have research experience in the fields of Economics of Education, Education Policy and Program Educational Evaluation and strong skills in the use of quantitative and quasi-experimental research methods.

Recently, I have also become very interested in the design of methods courses and the pedagogical tools for teaching research methods.

I am also interested in fostering democracy values among the youth. In 2016, I was awarded the National Youth Award from the government of Mexico for my contributions to the country's political culture and democracy.