Dr. Mayra Cazares-Minero holds an MSW and PhD in Social Welfare from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Psychology from the University of California, Riverside. For more than a decade, her research and professional work have focused on understanding the barriers that children, youth, and young adults facing adversity encounter across educational systems—and, importantly, identifying the individual, relational, institutional, and policy conditions that can promote their educational success. She is a Research Analyst with the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS) , where she works at the intersection of research, practice, and policy to advance equitable educational outcomes. A significant area of her recent work has focused on highly mobile youth—young people whose lives may involve overlapping experiences of homelessness, foster care, migration, or involvement with the juvenile legal system. In collaboration with UCLA CTS colleagues, she first-authored Often Overlooked but Not Unseen: An Overview of Highly Mobile Youth in the U.S., the first national study to examine how mobility across systems and living situations can disrupt educational continuity and why these students require greater attention from education systems and policymakers. She has also examined trends in student homelessness nationally, in California, and in Los Angeles County using federal and state-level data, including her 2025 report, 1.37 Million and Rising: Understanding the National 25% Spike in Student Homelessness, and her 2026 report, Rising Numbers, Fading Resources: Students Experiencing Homelessness in Los Angeles County.
More recently, Dr. Cazares-Minero has connected her work on foster youth and educational resilience to broader questions about what enables students who have experienced adversity to succeed in higher education. Through a 2025–2027 Transition-Age Youth Research and Evaluation Hub grant with Dr. Nathanael Okpych, she is examining why some California community colleges achieve better-than-expected outcomes for youth with foster care experience. The study considers both student and institutional factors that may contribute to persistence and graduation, with the goal of identifying practices and institutional conditions that can be adapted and replicated across colleges. Across her research, Dr. Cazares-Minero seeks to move beyond documenting disparities to identify the systems, policies, and practices that can strengthen educational pathways and create more supportive conditions for young people navigating adversity.
