Urban Schooling scholars recognized for their major contributions to educational research.
UCLA Professor of Education Lucrecia Santibañez and Distinguished Professor of Education Louis M. Gomez have been selected as 2025 AERA Fellows by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), among 29 exemplary scholars across the United States and Canada.
“Lucrecia and Louis are outstanding scholars whose exceptional and timely work deserves this important distinction,” says Christina Christie, Wasserman Dean of the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. “We are proud to have two of our esteemed faculty members honored by AERA.”
“The 2025 AERA Fellows join a brilliant group of scholars, and they are most deserving of this honor,” says AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine. “Their significant contributions to the education research field demonstrate the highest standards of academic excellence and scholarship.”
Professor Santibañez’ research focuses on understanding and improving teaching and learning for low-income, English learner classified, and other vulnerable student populations in the United States, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. She previously was an economist at the RAND Corporation and taught at CIDE in Mexico City and Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas in San Salvador.
Santibañez’ papers have been published by Educational Researcher, Economics of Education Review, Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, and Review of Educational Research. Her research has been funded by the Institutes of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the WT Grant Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Inter-American Development Bank and The World Bank.
Professor Gomez is a faculty member in the division of Urban Schooling and the UCLA Principal Leadership Institute. His scholarship focuses on helping to support community formation in schools and other organizations so that they can collaboratively create new approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment. Most recently, he has used Improvement Science to support this work in Education.
Before arriving at UCLA in 2011, Professor Gomez filled several positions at the University of Pittsburgh, including the Helen S. Faison Professor in Urban Education and director of the Center for Urban Education, senior scientist at the Learning Research & Development Center, and professor in the Department of Psychology. At UCLA, Gomez served as the MacArthur Chair in Digital Media and Learning in the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies from 2011 to 2016. He is also a member of the National Academy of Education.
“I deeply appreciate my AERA colleagueship,” says Professor Gomez.
The AERA Fellows Program honors scholars for their exceptional contributions to, and excellence in, education research. Nominated by their peers, the 2025 Fellows were selected by the Fellows Committee and approved by the AERA Council, the association’s elected governing body. They will be inducted during a ceremony at the 2025 Annual Meeting in Denver on April 24. With this cohort, there will be a total of 791 AERA Fellows.
UCLA Education alumna Tara Yosso (’00, Ph.D., Urban Schooling), professor and associate dean of academic personnel in the School of Education at UC Riverside, has also been selected as a 2025 AERA Fellow.
AERA is the largest national interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning. Founded in 1916, AERA advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education, and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.
At left: UCLA Distinguished Professor of Education Louis M. Gomez