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Contact; Jon Meerdink ([email protected])

ANN ARBOR — Andres Pinedo is a tenure-track assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, conducting research on how young people challenge inequality. Partnering with multiple school districts in California, he plans to recruit about 2,000 students to clarify how they develop and put into practice their understanding of inequality.

That’s Pinedo’s work today, but just six years ago he was just arriving at the University of Michigan, having just completed his undergraduate degree at the University of California. Pinedo had eyes on a Ph.D. via U-M’s combined program in education and psychology. Early in that program, Pinedo made his first contact with the Institute for Social Research, launching what would be a fruitful collaboration thanks to a training grant that allowed him to attend the ICPSR summer program.

“I applied and I was funded, which allowed me to take two very critical classes at ICPSR: longitudinal analysis and structural equation modeling,” Pinedo said. “I had a wonderful experience that summer in terms of my learning and my growth as a scholar and a researcher.”  

From there, Pinedo earned a grant from the Sarri Family Fellowship — a critical development in his still-young career, planting the seeds for a project that he’s still working on to this day.

“The grant allowed me to conduct a rigorous assessment of student development within an ethnic studies curriculum in California and collect data with high school students over the course of an academic year,” he said. “That project ended up being a part of my dissertation, and the study was published in Developmental Psychology about a year ago now.” 

Those two awards weren’t all Pinedo gained from ISR, though. In addition to the valuable training, he took advantage of the opportunity to learn from the community of scholars and affiliates at ISR, investing in collaborative relationships that furthered his career and sharpened his research perspectives.

“The relationships that I developed along the way with ISR affiliates benefitted my work in the best of ways. They allowed me to develop deep and extensive expertise in social science methods in theory regarding human behavior and group dynamics. On top of the monetary supports that allowed me to do some of that research and data collection, those mentor relationships were really most critical to my growth as a scholar.”

Pinedo’s association with ISR put him on the pathway to the position he now holds, and even today, he leverages his experience to stand out in his research field. Thanks to what he learned at ISR, he’s able to continue important research that will shape his career and research output for years to come. 

Now, I’m conducting more large scale projects that address the same research questions I was pursuing when I was at the University of Michigan and at ISR. That initial project set the foundation for my newer projects, and I think my experience and my training at Michigan allowed me to gather insights that are now really facilitating a long-term research agenda while I’m here at Vanderbilt.”