Keith Curry Doctoral Award: Carlos Sandoval

At the UCI School of Education's 2019 Doctoral Student Recognition Ceremony, Associate Professor Stephanie Reich invited Dr. Keith Curry, CEO of Compton Community College District and School of Education Alumnus, to come forward for the presentation of the Keith Curry Doctoral Award.

Stephanie Reich Presentation Text

​The Keith Curry Award was established by Dr. Curry to honor a Ph.D. student who has demonstrated significant growth in academic achievement and unusual perseverance – qualities that Dr. Curry believes characterized his journey toward his doctorate. This year’s recipient of the Keith Curry scholarship award, Carlos Sandoval, exemplifies these characteristics. 

Carlos Sandoval is a third year doctoral student in the School of Education who has demonstrated academic perseverance as well as excellence in education research. He is a highly deserving recipient of the Keith Curry Scholarship and Award.  

After completing his first two years of post-secondary education in the community college system, Carlos transferred to UCLA where he was the first person in his family to graduate from a 4-year college. Following graduation, Carlos was awarded a position as a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In this role, Carlos designed measurement and data analytic tools, created professional development programs, and brokered partnerships. He also co-authored a manuscript that was published in one of the leading national journals on the study of teaching, Journal of Teacher Education. 

Since arriving at UCI, Carlos has continued to excel as he further builds his academic skills. He was awarded a prestigious NSF Graduate Student Research Fellowship. He also has become deeply involved in developing a networked-improvement community (NIC) across all nine of the University of California teacher preparation programs. Drawing on methods of improvement science, an approach to improving health systems, Carlos developed data displays that helped program leaders across the campuses identify a shared problem of practice -– preparing teacher education candidates to support multilingual learners in their classroom. This year, Carlos led a group of faculty, teacher educators, supervisors, and graduate students across the nine campuses to identify the source of this shared problem, make visible theories of action for learning, develop strategies for supporting teacher candidate learning, and developing a measurement system to assess the impact of these strategies on teacher candidate learning and practice.   In all of his work, we see Carlos’ deep commitment to understanding how to better preparing future teachers to meet the needs of all students in California schools. 

Carlos Sandoval & Dr. Keith Curry