Friday, March 8, 2024
Featured Speaker
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto
Dean of the Clinton School of Public Service
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto is Dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas and is a political analyst for NBC News and Telemundo.
Victoria is the first Latina Dean at a presidential institution and is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administrators. Victoria previously taught at Northwestern University, Rutgers, and The University of Texas at Austin. She and received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University.
Her areas of expertise include civic engagement, women, immigration, Latinos and political psychology. Underlying all of her research interests is the applicability of high-quality, rigorous research to on-the-ground policy realities. Victoria has spent over two decades bridging academic, practitioner, community, and media realms in her quest to cultivate public service engagement across our national landscape.
An award-winning professor, Victoria is deeply passionate about the intersection of curricular and community-based learning and cultivating dynamic classroom environments that are responsive to our real-world context. Throughout her more than 20 years in a classroom, Victoria has designed and implemented curricular innovation to challenge both herself and her students to think bigger and be maximally impactful.
As the Dean of the Clinton School, Victoria grounds her passion to support the next generation of public service leaders through the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion inside and outside the classroom.
While Victoria is new to Arkansas, she has immersed herself in the vibrancy of the Natural State and was recently named one of the 100 Women of Impact by the Arkansas Women’s Foundation. At the same time Victoria remains active in national service organizations such as Mi Familia Vota and the Partnership for Public Service.
Victoria is the proud graduate of the University of Arizona, a land-grant institution, and has firsthand experienced the transformative power of education that our public institutions of higher learning provide.
Saturday, March 9, 2024
Featured Speaker
Reagan Bijou
Associate Research Director with YouGov’s Scientific Research Group
Reagan is an Associate Research Director with YouGov’s Scientific Research Group, where she manages custom survey research projects for academic, non-profit, and legal clients. She has been involved with projects including the Cooperative Election Study (CES), the Collaborative Midterm Survey (CMS), and the American National Election Studies (ANES).
Reagan holds an A.A. in Social Sciences from Lee College in Baytown, Texas (her hometown), a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Arkansas at Monticello, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Merced.
While at Lee College, Reagan was a captain of the Mendoza Debate Society and earned national recognition in intercollegiate debate. At UAM, she continued debating and developed interest in interdisciplinary research, having presented at the World Congress on Undergraduate Research in Doha, Qatar, and the Alpha Chi National Convention in Louisville, Kentucky.
At UC Merced, Reagan’s research interests and experience focused on the realms of public opinion, political psychology, and experimental design; she has co-authored publications featured in Perspectives on Politics, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Politics, and Teaching Experimental Political Science. In her dissertation, she explored how exposure to government symbols (e.g., black robes, official seals) help shape the public’s attitudes across the three branches of the U.S. government. Reagan also worked as the Political Science Lab Manager, where she enjoyed running experiments and consulting with graduate students and professors on a wide range of research projects.
When she’s not working – and even when she is – she enjoys listening to vinyl.