Dr. Alicia Dowd

Dr. Alicia C. Dowd is a Professor of Education and Faculty Research Associate of the Center for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) at The Pennsylvania State University. Dowd studies and leads on issues of organizational learning and change towards racial equity in higher education. She served as CSHE director for six years (2018-2024) and led a major restructuring of the 50-year-old center to conduct mission-focused, interdisciplinary research dedicated to advancing anti-oppressive educational policy, practice, and partnerships.

An action researcher who has engaged in collaborative, mixed-methods research throughout her career, Dowd conceptualizes and designs for change utilizing cultural-historical activity theory, developmental evaluation, and critical race theory. From 2009-2015, Dowd co-directed the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California, where she was instrumental in designing and researching outcomes of CUE’s ‘Equity Scorecard’ action research process. She is the author (with Estela Mara Bensimon) of Engaging the “Race Question”: Accountability and Equity in U.S. Higher Education (Teachers College Press, 2015), which teases out the conflicting ideologies and theories of justice that underlie practitioners’ sense of right and wrong concerning matters of access, equity, and quality in college access and student outcomes.

Through numerous published case studies of ‘equity- by-design’ strategies, Dowd has advanced understanding of the leadership, policy, and learning structures needed to support the development of racial equity change agents at historically and predominantly white colleges and universities. Areas of focus include institutional accountability, curriculum reform, racial equity in access to STEM degrees.

Through service to federal agencies, including the Congressional House subcommittee on Research and Science Education, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academies of Sciences, Dowd has been a policy advocate for greater diversity and equity in STEM fields. She is currently the program director of the Inclusive Excellence (IE3) Learning Community initiative at Penn State, which is funded as part of a national science education reform effort involving over 100 colleges and universities by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Previously she has served as PI or co-PI for research funded by the Spencer, Ford, Gates, Hewlett, Lumina, Nellie Mae, and Jack Kent Cooke Foundations as well as by the National Science Foundation.

From 2016-2022, Dowd served as associate editor of the Review of Educational Research (RER), which was the #1 education/education research journal in global rankings during that period.

Dowd holds the Ph.D., M.Ed. and B.A. degrees, all awarded by Cornell University, where she studied the social foundations of education, labor economics, and curriculum and instruction.