ABOUT

Susan Yonezawa is Associate Director of CREATE at the University of California, San Diego. Yonezawa straddles the worlds of policy, practice, and research, working to embed research and design techniques and mindsets into the lived practices and policies of urban public schooling. She analyzes and engages issues of diversity, opportunity, and inequality in schools and communities, with a focus on the district, school and classroom leverage points that can increase college access for underrepresented, low-income students.

Yonezawa works with and helps lead educators and researchers at CREATE in design-based research and evaluation on educational practices K-20. She does this with her colleagues by providing teacher professional development for K-14 educators in science, mathematics, reading and writing, and modelling and testing new designs within college outreach programs –including statewide Early Academic Outreach Programs (EAOP) and federal TRIO programs such as Upward Bound.  University-school partnerships, such as the nationally recognized Preuss School at UC San Diego (the #1 Transformative High School in the country as designated by Newsweek) are also supported and evaluated by Yonezawa and colleagues.  She serves on the Education Committee for the Preuss School and has done so for the past 5 years.

Yonezawa has received support from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Yankelovich Foundation, UC Office of the President, Price Philanthropies, Bill and Melinda Gates  Spencer, Carnegie and Nellie Mae Foundations. Her work on school reform and student voice has been published in numerous national, peer-reviewed journals.  She is currently the PI on three major grants: one from the  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (examining/supporting Common Core math teacher networks across four major districts), another from the Office of Naval Research (supporting Next Generation Science Standards Implementation with 80 high school teachers from four districts), and on a National Science Foundation STEM+C grant — Computer Science — Creating a Village for Educators which aims to increase computer science courses and teachers in K12 schools across three districts. 

CREATE, which Yonezawa co-directs, was designated and funded by Chancellor Pradeep Khosla in 2013 to serve as a portal through which UC San Diego could launch the CREATE STEM Success Initiative (CSSI). CSSI uses the Tier-1 research university explicitly in an exciting new way – for design-based educational research, service, and outreach — with a specific focus on marshalling broader impact efforts of STEM PIs across the campus towards greater collective impact in the San Diego region. Along with CREATE’s Director, Yonezawa oversees numerous programs linking UC San Diego STEM faculty, staff and students to local teachers and underrepresented students, to specifically patch holes in the K-20 STEM pipeline to college/career. She received the 2014-15 UC San Diego University-wide Diversity & Equity Award and recently, the 2019 Dr. Winston C. Doby Impact Award.