Yedalis Ruíz

Dr. Yedalis Ruiz, is an educational researcher and scholar/practitioner with 20 years experience working in community educational programming, STEM education and evaluation, and advocacy and inclusion programs. She earned both her PhD and Master’s degrees at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Educational Policy, Research and Administration with a concentration in higher education from the College of Education. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Education from Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on issues of educational access and equity among lower-income, first-generation, BIPOC communities and her work aims to bridge access to opportunities for college and career advancement through critical and collaborative community engagement frameworks and practice.

Yedalis is a quantitative and qualitative researcher and is trained in educational program evaluation and assessment methodologies by the Office for Research on Evaluation at Cornell University. She has worked as an evaluator focused on access and equity aimed at broadening diversity in education since 2010 in the science and engineering fields at UMass, Smith College, and as an independent consultant for programs funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Since the fall 2013, she has been teaching undergraduate and graduate students at UMass and Bay Path University and was the Director/Faculty Advisor of the Student Bridges Agency at UMass, Amherst since 2017. She currently holds a faculty appointment in the graduate higher education program at UMass and teaches Foundations of Higher Education; Critical Perspectives of Equity and Justice in Higher Education; and Professional Practice and Career Development in Higher Education.