Patricia Gandara

Patricia Gándara is Research Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences at UCLA. She received her PhD in educational psychology from UCLA. She has been a bilingual school psychologist, a social scientist with the RAND Corporation and Director of Education research in the California legislature. Between 2011 and 2015 she served on President Obama’s Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. She has also been a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, the French-American Association at Sciences Po Graduate Institute, Paris, and an ETS fellow at Princeton, New Jersey. Since 1990 she has been a professor of education in the University of California system. She also served as commissioner for postsecondary education for the State of California, associate director of the Linguistic Minority Research Institute, and the co-director of PACE (Policy Analysis for California Education. She is currently co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA. In 2019 she was awarded the Reconocimiento Alfonso Garcia Robles by the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for work on behalf of migrant students and in 2022 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.