September 27, 2017

Dolly Nguyen, new SAA faculty member, named 2017-2018 CMSI Research Fellow

The Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions (CMSI) is committed to supporting scholarship on Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). For the past 4 years, they have offered an annual CMSI Research Fellowship for scholars who conduct research at or related to MSIs to pursue a project of their choosing.

The Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions (CMSI) has just named Bach Mai Dolly Nguyen as their 2017-18 research fellow. Committed to supporting scholarship on Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), CMSI has offered a Research Fellowship for the past four years to support scholars who conduct research at or related to MSIs in pursuing a project of their choosing. According to the Penn Center’s announcement, this one-year fellowship carries a $5,000 stipend and also pays for the fellow’s travel and room & board for one of CMSI’s national conventions. In addition, CMSI will disseminate the fellow’s culminating research through our network of supporters and readers.

Nguyen has recently joined the Graduate School of Education and Counseling at Lewis & Clark College as their first-ever Student Affairs Administration tenure-track faculty member. Her research examines inequality in educational opportunity, with attention to racial stratification, racial heterogeneity, and organizational change. In combination, these areas of research have manifested in studies on ethnic stratification, MSIs, and overlooked student populations. Dolly’s work has been published in Review of Higher Educationand AAPI Nexus and her research has been utilized in policy work at institutional and state levelsShe received her MA in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles and her BA from University of Washington, Seattle.

The announcement outlines Nguyen’s plans for the research fellowship as follows:

Bach Mai Dolly will use the CMSI Research Fellowship to explore the early adoption processes of two newly-funded Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs). The study seeks to answer the questions: 1) How can MSI status be institutionalized within college structures to sustain the benefits of the designation? and 2) To what extent do institutions have to become racialized in order to sustain the benefits of MSI status? In answering these questions, the study will contribute a greater understanding to the extent it takes to integrate, embody and institutionalize MSI status into the larger college structure, and the challenges to institutionalization and sustainability.

She is also interested in the study of racial stratification and heterogeneity across the K-20 pipeline, particularly how institutions are mitigating inequalities that follow students throughout the entirety of their educational experiences. Her goal is to uplift AANAPISIs by introducing critical research that offers a theoretical approach to the structural inequalities at institutions, highlight the severe barriers facing racial and ethnic minorities in higher education and examine the significance of longitudinal studies on education with an emphasis on its impact on students entering the labor force.

For further information about CMSI, please visit www.gse.upenn.edu/cmsi.