Glenda Palacios Quejada is a postdoctoral researcher with the School of Government and the Faculty of Education at Universidad de los Andes. Her work focuses on race, education and structural inequality in Latin America, particularly Colombia. Trained in the economics of education and quantitative social science, she examines how racial and ethnic disparities shape educational opportunities, developmental trajectories and life outcomes across marginalized communities.
She has contributed to projects on equity, particularly among Afro-Colombian and Indigenous populations, using quantitative and community-engaged approaches. She works with large-scale longitudinal and administrative datasets in Colombia and the United States to generate causal evidence on structural inequality, with a particular focus on how social and structural conditions influence children’s learning and development across diverse Colombian contexts. As a member of the Public Health Research Group at Universidad de los Andes, her work contributes to the development of culturally and contextually grounded approaches to measuring learning, cognition and socioemotional development. She seeks to generate empirical evidence that addresses the statistical invisibility of historically marginalized populations and contributes to reducing gaps in cognitive and educational outcomes across Colombia.