Jacqueline Pedota

Dr. Jackie Pedota is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Leadership in Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She earned her Ph.D. and M.Ed. from the University of Texas at Austin and has a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida. Before pursuing an academic career, she worked for over a decade across the P-20 educational pipeline including roles in K-12 instruction, non-profit management, educational technology, and higher education administration.

Dr. Pedota's research broadly examines how educational access and opportunity are shaped within racialized institutional contexts and constrained by restrictive policy environments. Drawing on organizational theory, socio-legal analysis, and historical inquiry, her work illuminates the mechanisms that reinforce and reproduce inequities for historically marginalized communities in higher education.

Dr. Pedota's scholarship has received national recognition, including the prestigious Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the Outstanding Publication Award from AERA's Division J. Her research has been featured at national conferences such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Sociological Association (ASA), the Oral History Association (OHA), the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), and the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS). Dr. Pedota's work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including The Journal of Higher Education, Educational Researcher, and Education Sciences, as well as in news outlets such as Inside Higher Ed.