Ximena Dominguez

Ximena Dominguez, PhD, serves as co-executive director of Digital Promise’s Center for Learning Sciences Research (CLSR), where she oversees a dedicated group of researchers and learning scientists working to improve teaching and learning across preschool, PreK-12, and postsecondary programs. Through research-practice partnerships and the application of rigorous and innovative methodologies, CLSR aims to answer pressing questions in education, respond to challenges on the ground, and identify opportunities to inform the design of educational innovations.

In addition to serving as co-executive director, Dr. Dominguez leads Digital Promise’s early learning portfolio. Her work involves co-designing and evaluating teaching and learning resources in partnership with early childhood educators, families, and curriculum and edtech designers. She studies how young children’s interests and everyday experiences can be leveraged to meaningfully promote STEM learning across home and school and explores when and how learning across various domains can be feasibly and meaningfully integrated to promote outcomes broadly. Across efforts, she explores the affordances of technology for supporting teaching and learning—documenting how emerging technologies should be designed to strengthen (not replace) the hands-on, socially rich, and collaborative learning that is key in early childhood.

Before stepping into her current role, Dr. Dominguez spent almost two decades directing large-scale research initiatives at SRI International and Digital Promise. Over the course of her career, she has secured and managed tens of millions of dollars in highly competitive external funding from federal agencies and global foundations. Her research directly impacts communities through collaborative efforts that bring together interdisciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, families and designers to build practical, engaging, and effective educational tools and frameworks.

Beyond her institutional leadership, Dr. Dominguez is a recognized authority in national education policy. In addition to leading grants from the federal and philanthropic organizations, she has been selected to serve on prominent committees for the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), recently contributing to the consensus study Science and Engineering in Preschool Through Elementary Grades and the congressionally mandated study Scaling and Sustaining Pre-K-12 STEM Education Innovations. She regularly serves as reviewer for early childhood journals and her academic contributions have earned prestigious peer-reviewed recognition, including article of the year honors. She earned an MSEd from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in applied developmental psychology from the University of Miami.