Anne-Marie Núñez, Ph.D.
Executive Director

Anne-Marie Núñez is the inaugural executive director of the Diana Natalicio Institute for Hispanic Student Success and Distinguished Centennial Professor in Educational Leadership and Foundations at The University of Texas at El Paso. She has collaborated on several NSF grants with budgets totaling over $10 million, including with the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), to build inclusive environments in geoscience and computer science disciplines. Her award-winning research employs sociological approaches to explore how multiple social identities (e.g., racial, ethnic, class, linguistic) shape educational opportunities. She has published several studies on the higher education experiences and trajectories of Latinx, first-generation, English Learner, working, and migrant students. Her book, Latinos in higher education and Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Creating conditions for success, has provided a framework for serving Latinx students in higher education. In addition, she co-edited Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Advancing Research and Transformative Practice, an International Latino Book Award winner and the first book to focus on HSIs as organizations. She also has served as a National Academy of Sciences Committee member to co-author and disseminate a report about how Minority-Serving Institutions contribute to the science workforce.

Azuri Gonzalez, Ed.D.
Regents’ Endowed Distinguished Director

Azuri L. Gonzalez has dedicated her career to the transformation of higher education in support of faculty community engaged scholarship, student high-impact practices, and the overall alignment of institutional priorities for strategic change. She concurrently serves as the Executive Director for the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities ( hsru.org ) and was most recently the director of the Center for Community Engagement (CCE) and co-director of the Center for Faculty Leadership and Development at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). As director of the CCE, she led UTEP’s Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement in 2010, its reclassification in 2020, and its achievement of the Texas Governor’s Higher Education Community Impact Award in 2017. As a practitioner scholar, Dr. Gonzalez co-edited “ Community Engagement and High Impact Practices in Higher Education” (Kendall Hunt, 2018), and co-constructed a framework for lifelong learning through global citizenship approaches in higher education grounded in critical community engagement (forthcoming 2022). She earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in Political Science and her doctoral degree in Educational Leadership and Administration from UTEP.