Mary Dueñas, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of higher education and serves as the program coordinator for the SAHE M.S. program at the University of Tennessee. Her scholarship explores how institutions of higher education are negotiated spaces where students navigate structural and interpersonal challenges while drawing on cultural strengths, relationships, and resilience to persist. Her work examines how students continuously mediate tensions between their identities and institutional expectations while constructing a sense of belonging as they navigate, persist, and reshape educational environments that often fail to fully recognize or affirm their experiences. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, her research focuses on three intersecting areas: (1) belonging, mattering, imposter experiences, and help-seeking as key psychosociocultural outcomes shaping students’ experiences; (2) institutional practices that influence and mediate how Latine college students engage their cultural strengths and motivations; and (3) college students’ experiences, interpretations, and responses to educational environments. Her work has been published in the Journal of Diversity of Higher Education, Journal of College Student Development, Journal of Latinos and Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Dueñas is an active member of ASHE, AERA, and AAHHE and earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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