Sarah Lynette Rodriguez, a graduate of Eustace High School and former student at Trinity Valley Community College, received her Ph.D. in Educational Administration with a concentration in Higher Education Leadership from The University of Texas at Austin on May 23.

Rodriguez holds a Master’s of Education in College Student Personnel from the University of Tennessee, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish with honors from Texas A&M University-Commerce.

Rodriguez is the daughter of Donna Goodell of Eustace and Gilbert Rodriguez of Aurora, Colorado and granddaughter of Tom Billy and Helen Goodell of Eustace.

While at UT,  Rodriguez served as a Graduate Research Assistant for Engaging Latino Students for Transfer and College Completion, a national initiative at the Center for Community College Student Engagement, a research initiative of the Program in Higher Education Leadership  focused on helping institutions strengthen Latino student engagement, transfer  and college completion.

Rodriguez has also been involved with the national initiative Improving Outcomes for Men of Color in Community Colleges Initiative at the Center for Community College Student Engagement, and served as the Research Coordinator for Project MALES (Mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational Success), both of which focused on improving educational outcomes for men of color. As the Research Coordinator for Project MALES, a research and programmatic initiative to increase college retention and graduation rates of Latino males, she worked with the organization’s Executive Director and Founder, Dr. Victor Saenz, in collaboration with K-12, community colleges, and four-year institutions across the State of Texas, to conduct in-depth qualitative research and shape recommendations for policy and practice concerning the experiences of Latino male students.

During her academic career, Sarah has consistently been ranked among the top 10 percent of students at her respective universities and has presented at conferences at the national, regional, and local levels and authored journal articles, book chapters, policy briefs, and other publications on Latina/o student success. While at UT, Sarah was named a Community College Leadership Program Endowment Honors Scholar and a Diversity Mentoring Fellow as well as received the Dr. Bill Lasher Doctoral Student Excellence Award and the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement Rose Martinez Student Excellence Award.

At a national level, Rodriguez has been named a Gates Millennium Scholar from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an American Educational Research Association (AERA) Emerging Scholar, an American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) Fellow, and also serves as an Affiliate Faculty Member for the Minority Male Community College Collaborative (M2C3) and Project MALES.

In the fall, Rodriguez will be joining Iowa State University as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Community College Leadership/Higher Education, conducting educational research and teaching in the areas of community college and higher education research and practice, as well as research methods courses. Rodriguez’s research interests center upon equity, access, and retention issues for Latina and Latino students in the educational pipeline, with a special focus on the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students.