Anne-Marie Núñez, Ph.D.
Inaugural Executive Director

Anne-Marie Núñez, Ph.D., 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. Her work employs sociological approaches to examine how to design organizations and systems to broaden postsecondary educational opportunities. She has published several studies on the higher education experiences and trajectories of Latine, first-generation, English Learner, working, and migrant students. As a national expert on Hispanic-Serving Institutions, her co-edited book Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Advancing Research and Transformative Practice, the first ever to focus on HSIs as organizations, won an International Latino Book Award. In her work to expand inclusive science approaches, she has led and collaborated on over $30 million of funded projects to advance educational effectiveness, experiential learning, and community engagement in computing and geoscience fields, particularly in Hispanic-Serving Institutions. An American Educational Research Association Fellow, she has also been recognized in Education Week’s Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings as among the top 200 scholars in the U.S. influencing educational practice and policy. In addition, she is an elected member of the National Academy of Education for her outstanding scholarship and leadership related to education.

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.