Gabriella C. Gonzalez

Biography

Gabriella C. Gonzalez is a social scientist at the RAND Corporation. Her areas of interest are in the educational attainment of youth, disparities in health and education for minorities, immigrants, and disadvantaged populations, social stratification and inequality, neighborhood effects, and human capital development. She recently completed an evaluation of the early progress of The Pittsburgh Promise, a postsecondary education scholarship program. Recent publications on immigrant children include her 2011 co-authored article in Future of Children—which assessed immigrant family's access to and utilization of early childcare education, noting barriers that discourage full access and usage—and the 2005 book, Educational Attainment in Immigrant Families: Community Context and Family Background. In addition to her work on U.S. students and schooling, she has deep interest in education reform in the Middle East. For four years she was based at the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute in Doha, Qatar, studying the implementation of Qatar's K-12 education reform. Her 2008 co-authored book, Facing Human Capital Challenges of the 21st Century, analyzed the education and labor market reforms of four countries in the Middle East. She recently conducted a study on the demographic challenges facing Abu Dhabi for the Office of Strategic Affairs of the Crown Prince Court of Abu Dhabi and analyzed the skills mismatch problem in Arab Gulf countries for the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research. Gonzalez received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.