Professor Patricia Gándara Appointed Faculty Associate
to UC Vice President for Educational Outreach

OAKLAND -- UC Davis Professor Patricia Gándara has been appointed faculty associate to University of California Vice President for Educational Outreach Winston C. Doby.

"My principal interest is to connect more closely our internal work in research and evaluation with work that is being done externally, most specifically at the All Campus Consortium of Research for Diversity and at other places such as Harvard," said Doby of Gándara’s one-year appointment.

Gándara chairs the research committee of the All Campus Consortium of Research for Diversity (UC ACCORD). She will advise Doby on the outreach research agenda and also lead the planning of a major conference on access and opportunity to learn issues.

In the Fall, Gándara will be a visiting scholar at Harvard University, where she will collaborate with The Harvard Civil Rights Project on a major research project dealing with expanding access to higher education for underrepresented students. While at Harvard, Gándara will travel regularly to California to fulfill her duties as Doby’s faculty assistant. She will resume teaching at UCD for the Winter quarter.

"I hope to help bring more coherence to some of the research activities in which we are engaged nationally that promote access to higher education for diverse populations and hopefully be able to help move things forward at a faster pace," said Gándara, whose research encompasses equity and access in K-12 and higher education, the education of English learners and ethnically diverse populations.

Gándara is also associate director of UC’s Linguistic Minority Research Institute (LMRI) and she directs the LMRI Education Policy Center at UC Davis, which sponsors research and colloquia on policy issues in the education of English learners. She is the author of numerous papers and books, including “Paving the Way to Postsecondary Education, K-12 Intervention Strategies for Underrepresented Youth,� which was published in 2001.

Gándara holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology and a B.A. in sociology/English literature from UCLA, and an M.S. in counseling/school psychology from California State University, Los Angeles. Additional biographical information is available
here.