Board Member
Dr. Mayra P. (ella/she) is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines higher education access and choice, with particular attention to rural Latinx students from migrant farmworker and other manual labor backgrounds in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast regions. Grounded in her experiences as a first-generation college student from a Mexican migrant farmworker family in East Porterville, California, Mayra's scholarship is driven by a deep commitment to advancing equity and access in higher education for rural communities. She earned her Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, San Diego, and her B.A. in political science, with a concentration in race, ethnicity, and politics, from UCLA. At UCLA, she also completed double minors in education studies and Chicana/o studies, and served as Project Director of The Central Valley Project, a student-run organization similar to Central Valley Scholars.
