Dr. Benah J. Parker is the Director of Education Policy and Research at the Center for the Future of Arizona. While a graduate student in the social psychology program at Arizona State University, she served as a graduate research assistant on the Center’s Arizona Dropout Initiative and and later worked as a consultant to the Center in its effort to develop models and goals for increasing graduation rates for Arizona’s high school students.
During her graduate career at ASU, she was a recipient of the prestigious Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship for Minorities, as well as several graduate college scholarships and travel awards. She presented empirical research in poster sessions and symposia at various regional, national and international psychology conferences, and reviewed manuscripts for multiple academic journals. She also taught an upper-division Social Psychology course for the University.
Dr. Parker’s research interests include exploring how individuals of different genders and ethnic backgrounds manage multiple social identities, and how those identities and roles affect behavior and cognitive processing. Her dissertation, begun while she was a graduate research assistant at CFA, explored how these various group memberships affect the factors that influence academic achievement and a students’ likelihood of earning a high school diploma. She intends to build on this research and academic training in her new role as Director.
Dr. Parker was born and raised in Friendswood, Texas and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her B.A. in Psychology in 1997. She moved to the Phoenix area in 1999 to attend graduate school at ASU and earned both her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Social Psychology. She currently lives in Mesa with her husband David Lundberg-Kenrick and they recently welcomed the arrival of their son Finian.
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