As Catalina Rey-Guerra studied to become an economist, she learned how to navigate complex statistical problems—but she soon discovered a passion for researching complex human issues rather than numerical ones.
“We are always trying to understand how people think and behave, right?” Rey-Guerra said. “In different ways and through different theories. But, in the end, we mainly want to understand how people behave. I started feeling that I had a lot of tools from economics, like statistics and also theory, that helped me understand part of the picture but not the whole picture.”
Now, in her fifth and final year as a doctoral candidate in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Rey-Guerra is gathering data for her dissertation and working to finalize her research. And since winning the National Academy of Education’s Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, she’s finishing up her research on a full-time basis.
The National Academy of Education’s Spencer Dissertation Fellowship provides financial support to doctoral candidates in their final year of research. According to the academy’s website, the fellowship committee selects the most talented researchers with interests relevant to the field of education.
Rey-Guerra’s research focuses on gender disparities in education and parenting, a topic that affects many people throughout the world, she said.
Rey-Guerra was born in Colombia and received her undergraduate degree in economics from Universidad del Rosario and her master’s degree in economics and public policy from Universidad de Los Andes.
Born to an engineer father and scientist mother, Rey-Guerra said her parents pushed her to pursue a more scientific field, which prompted her to study economics. Once she started her undergraduate degree, she became passionate about how economics impacts real people, she said.
“I knew that I wanted to do something social,” Rey-Guerra said. “I wanted to interact with people and understand people, so I pursued this line of studies of behavioral economics, economics of education.”
Through research projects within her university, she began interacting with Colombia’s Ministry of National Education. In her work with this government ministry, she crossed paths with many psychologists. This work eventually inspired her to pursue a career researching developmental psychology, she said.
“This psychologist started showing me this whole new world that I hadn’t really heard about before,” Rey-Guerra said.
During this time, Rey-Guerra heard a bit about Boston College, and she knew the City of Boston had a large concentration of universities and an increasing international population. She began to look into doctoral programs in the Boston area, she said, eventually landing at BC.
Although Rey-Guerra faced the challenge of starting her program amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she still worked to foster relationships with her cohort members, according to Naoka Carey, another doctoral candidate and friend of Rey-Guerra’s. She brought the cohort together in spite of how hard it was to connect, Carey said.
“She did a lot of work to make the department a more supportive place for students,” Carey said.
One day, Carey said she explained how difficult she found it to present her research. After hearing this, Rey-Guerra worked to bring together students from the cohort so they could practice their presentations in front of each other before presenting to a board of professors.
“She’s thoughtful about other people’s work,” Carey said. “She asks wonderful questions when they’re presenting and she’s thinking about what they’re saying.”
When Rey-Guerra was admitted to BC’s doctoral program, Eric Dearing became her adviser—who she conducts research beside and consults for advice on her dissertation. Dearing originally accepted Rey-Guerra into the program, he said.
“When first reading Catalina’s application, it was really impressive and appealing because of the breadth of the research she had already done and her background in economics,” Dearing said. “Increasingly, schools of education have become interdisciplinary—I think in really healthy ways that have brought together not just education researchers, but developmental psychologists like myself, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and experts with all of these diverse interests.”
Now, in her final year of her program, Rey-Guerra’s studies investigate how gender affects the way caregivers, teachers, and others treat children, she said.
“Our gender affects the way we behave, but it also affects the way that we see other people,” Rey-Guerra said.
A large breadth of past experience informs Rey-Guerra’s research. Before beginning her time at LSEHD, she worked on research projects at other universities and conducted research for Fundación Apapacho, an NGO she started in 2016 when Colombia signed a peace agreement with guerilla groups.
After the 2016 referendum was signed, Rey-Guerra and some of her colleagues decided to start Fundación Apapacho to promote the maintenance of peace through collaborative work with families and policy makers. They lead workshops on parenting practices and engage in advocacy work. The group is also pushing the Colombian government to implement a law banning corporal punishment, she said.
“We are trying to expand the impact as much as we can, through as many hats as we can,” Rey-Guerra said.
Students in a doctoral program spend the first few years taking classes, working on research alongside professors, teaching classes, and taking comprehensive exams. Once they pass these exams, they begin work on their dissertations, Rey-Guerra said. If lucky, they receive a grant of some kind and are able to spend their final year solely committed to research. If they don’t receive funding, they work while they finish their research, which can be difficult to manage, Rey-Guerra said.
Early on in her doctoral studies, Rey-Guerra knew that the Spencer Fellowship was a goal she wanted to pursue. Rey-Guerra proposed the idea of applying to Dearing in her third year.
“I knew all along that she was qualified and had a very good chance of getting it,” Dearing said.
Once Rey-Guerra told Dearing about her goal, the pair started to prepare for the application process.
“I wanted her to have the best chance she could have in getting it,” Dearing said. “You want to pursue things on an ambitious timeline. But the nature of the work is such that sometimes taking the time to have an even more beautiful proposal can be just enough to put you over the top.”
One of the qualifications for the Spencer Fellowship is that the applicant’s research is currently relevant. For Rey-Guerra, the possibility that her research could impact government policy is what makes her research timely and impactful, she said.
“For a researcher, one of the higher expectations or goals is to get your research to impact and maybe change some policies or cultural norms,” Rey-Guerra said. “It challenges you as a researcher to make your research more approachable, way more understandable for other people that are outside of academia.”
Through using meta-data and conducting qualitative interviews with families, Rey-Guerra said she is able to grasp the bigger picture while also exploring the niche intricacies of her research subject. Rey-Guerra is spending her final year researching for her dissertation in Colombia, where she collects data through family interviews.
When Rey-Guerra discovered that she won the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, she said it felt like a weight was lifted off her shoulders—she knew then that she would have the freedom to devote a year to her research.
Following the completion of her dissertation, Rey-Guerra wants to work with families in some capacity while expanding on her research and her work for Fundación Apapacho. Regardless of whether she finds a position as a professor, researcher, or government official, Rey-Guerra said she hopes to continue pushing to improve the communities around her with her work.
“She has the combination of a passion to do outstanding work on behalf of children and families, combined with the intellectual skills to really have a deep theoretical and conceptual knowledge base that allows her to not just attempt to do good in the world, but to really try to make the world a better place,” Dearing said.
