Peter Nguyen

Peter Nguyen is a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. His research is focused on racial inequality across multiple social domains, including education, STEM, and information literacy. Past work includes developing and administering a survey on diversity in nursing education recruitment and enrollment, a multi-site case study of how the culture of historically Black colleges and universities promotes inclusive curriculum and pedagogy in STEM, which resulted in a co-authored book (with Marybeth Gasman), Making Black Scientists: A Call to Action, that was recently published by Harvard University Press. He also recently completed (with Dolly Nguyen) a project on how the ideology of racial equity manifests—drives and shapes practices and policies—across diverse postsecondary campuses; findings from this work will appear in a book-length manuscript that is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. He is currently conducting a longitudinal study on how low-income/first-generation college students from a large and urban community college district pursue their pathways to a four-year degree in STEM. Additionally, he is co-leading a multi-campus evaluation related to competency-based education and supporting, with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, a large-scale evaluation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Networks for School Improvement” program. Nguyen’s work has been published in several peer-reviewed outlets, including American Educational Research Journal, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Nursing Outlook and Review of Research in Education. In 2017, he was recognized as an Emerging Scholar by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.