Eric R. Felix is the proud son of Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants. Born and raised in Anaheim, he is the product and beneficiary of public education from kindergarten to graduate school. A first-generation college student, he now gets to be a faculty member at San Diego State University teaching in Student Affairs and Community College Leadership programs. Using Critical Policy Analysis, he explores the ways policymakers craft higher education reform and how institutional leaders implement them. Particularly, Dr. Felix focuses on understanding how the implementation of lauded student success reforms may benefit, harm, or render invisible Latinx students and other racially minoritized groups in the community college context.

 Dr. Tammeil Y. Gilkerson is the Chancellor of the Peralta Community College District. Dr. Gilkerson is a leader in a number of statewide efforts to find solutions that address students’ basic needs, support undocumented and mixed-status students, and improve the quality and delivery of distance education in community college. She is passionate about building learner-centered institutions that reflect students' lived experiences, provide hope, and practice love. Core to this vision, she recognizes the need to nurture leadership and community-building at all institutional levels and has tried to create spaces where individuals can be supported and affirmed as they engage in the vulnerable act of learning and leading with authenticity, courage, and humility. Dr. Gilkerson sees herself simultaneously as a teacher and a student, consistently asking, what could be possible if we believe we can achieve liberation and social justice in our communities? And what will I risk to achieve it?

As a first-generation queer, Latinx, joto, they engage their scholarship through post-structuralist and transformative paradigms rooted in Xicana/Latina feminists epistemologies. Dr. González’s research agenda focuses on three strands; 1) examining the conditions, experiences, and outcomes for queer and/or trans communities; 2) Latinx Leadership and organizational change; and 3) racial equity policy implementation all within the community college context. Dr. González's foundational research has been published in many leading community college and higher education journals such as the Community College Journal of Research and Practice (CCJRP), the Journal of Research for Community Colleges (JARCC), the Journal for Student Affairs Research and Practice (JSARP), New Directions for Community Colleges (NDCC), and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (IJQSE).

Prior to Dr. González's appointment at Fresno State, they were a postdoctoral scholar in the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California (USC) Rossier School of Education. Dr. González informed the creation and development of the Change Leadership Toolkit (CLT) funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. González has over 10 years of Higher Education and Student Affairs experience having worked across institution types (private, state, R1, community colleges, HSIs, MSIs, PWIs) and functional areas (residence life, student development, student government, student life, student conduct, academic advising, retention based programs).