Juan Cortes has over a decade of experience working to improve outcomes for students across the K-12 and higher education sectors. His passion for a career in education began by helping local high school students from the Latinx community as they transitioned into postsecondary education. Working at a campus where services were offered in a culturally familiar context, he helped develop and implement a peer mentoring program to support increased rates of student persistence and completion. Within the K-12 education sector, Juan’s work has focused on research and program evaluation at the school system level. Through the Strategic Data Project Fellowship at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, he was placed in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District where he helped develop key indicators to measure progress on the district’s strategic initiatives as well as developing an on-track to graduate measure to help support early identification of students in need. In his subsequent role at Baltimore County Public Schools, his work focused primarily on designing, conducting, and reporting on various program evaluations and research projects for the school system.

Currently, Juan is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and a Graduate Research Assistant at the Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC).  His research focuses on the application of advanced quantitative methods to examine student’s academic trajectories through secondary education and to better understand access to postsecondary education, especially for minoritized and marginalized populations. He holds a master’s degree in higher education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Catholic University of America.