Biography
Melina Pinales was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Being the child of Mexican immigrants, her early cross-cultural experiences sparked her interest in understanding the developmental and educational pathways of multicultural and multilingual students from diverse settings. She pursued a B.S. in Human Development and Family Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 where she assisted with research examining the influence of language brokering on the socio-emotional adjustment of Mexican American adolescents.
She is a Gates Millennium Scholar, has been awarded the prestigious Eugene-Cota Robles Fellowship in support of her doctoral studies, and is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Currently, Melina is in her fourth year of her doctoral studies at UCI where she is specializing in Educational Policy and Social Context (EPSC). Utilizing both quantitative and mixed methodologies, her research interests are geared towards evaluating programs and discovering best practices in the education of children from diverse ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds to address policy reform, specifically in early childhood and K-3 educational settings.
Under the advisement of Distingushed Professor George Farkas, Melina is the Lead Project Coordinator of the UCI Reading One-to-One tutoring program where she assists with training a diverse group of undergraduate students in delivering effective reading instruction to Spanish-English bilingual first and second graders in the Santa Ana Unified School District. She has played a prominent role in the expansion of the program which has now served over 100 students in the district. She has also initiated an ongoing collaboration with the district to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of educational programs aimed at improving the academic performance of students in the early grades.
March 2020
Melina Pinales was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Being the child of Mexican immigrants, her early cross-cultural experiences sparked her interest in understanding the developmental and educational pathways of multicultural and multilingual students from diverse settings. She pursued a B.S. in Human Development and Family Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 where she assisted with research examining the influence of language brokering on the socio-emotional adjustment of Mexican American adolescents.
She is a Gates Millennium Scholar, has been awarded the prestigious Eugene-Cota Robles Fellowship in support of her doctoral studies, and is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Currently, Melina is in her fourth year of her doctoral studies at UCI where she is specializing in Educational Policy and Social Context (EPSC). Utilizing both quantitative and mixed methodologies, her research interests are geared towards evaluating programs and discovering best practices in the education of children from diverse ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds to address policy reform, specifically in early childhood and K-3 educational settings.
Under the advisement of Distingushed Professor George Farkas, Melina is the Lead Project Coordinator of the UCI Reading One-to-One tutoring program where she assists with training a diverse group of undergraduate students in delivering effective reading instruction to Spanish-English bilingual first and second graders in the Santa Ana Unified School District. She has played a prominent role in the expansion of the program which has now served over 100 students in the district. She has also initiated an ongoing collaboration with the district to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of educational programs aimed at improving the academic performance of students in the early grades.
March 2020
