María Torre, PhD

Dr. Torre is the director and co-founder of The Public Science Project. For the last 15 years she has been engaged in critical participatory action research projects nationally and internationally with schools, prisons, and community-based organizations seeking to further social justice. Her work introduced the concept of ‘participatory contact zones’ to collaborative research, and she continues to be interested in how democratic methodologies, radical inclusion, and notions of solidarity impact scientific inquiry. Before becoming director of The Public Science Project, Dr. Torre was chair of Education Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. She is a co-author of Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and Changing Minds: The Impact of College on a Maximum Security Prison. Her writing can also be found in volumes such as the Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology (American Psychological Association), Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation, and Place (Routledge), the Handbook of Action Research (Sage), and in journals such as Feminism and Psychology, the Journal of Social Issues, Qualitative Inquiry, and the Journal of Critical Psychology. Dr. Torre was a recipient of the American Psychological Association Division 35 Adolescent Girls Task Force Emerging Scientist and the Spencer Fellowship in Social Justice & Social Development in Educational Studies, and is on the national boards of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project and What Kids Can Do. She is also the 2013 recipient of the Michele Alexander Award for Early Career Excellence in Scholarship, Teaching, and Service from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues of the American Psychological Association.