Before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, Melinda Martin-Beltran earned her PhD in Educational Linguistics from Stanford University, working as a bilingual and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher in K-12 settings in the United States and Latin America.  As a teacher educator and applied linguist using anthropological and sociocultural approaches, Dr. Martin-Beltran has studied classroom practices and contexts that build upon the cultural and linguistic diversity of students to increase educational equity for language minority students. Her research seeks to understand ways that learners (both students and teachers) engage in the co-construction of knowledge and the social processes of learning. She has led a research project examining the Language Ambassadors program for English learners and Spanish learners in high school, funded by the Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education Postdoctoral fellowship. She was co-PI on a federally funded project developing a cross-age, peer tutoring reading program to support vocabulary development and reading comprehension of younger and older English learners in elementary schools. Dr. Martin-Beltran also works with CASA de Maryland as part of a Promise Neighborhood Grant funded by the Department of Education.