Clarissa Reneé Ozuna was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Coming from a family of educators and public servants, the value of education and contributing to the community was instilled in her at an early age. These values continue to drive Clarissa’s personal and professional endeavors. Clarissa has years of experience in the K-12 public education system and in higher education at both 2- and 4-year institutions. As a research scientist associate at The Texas State Data Center and Office of the State Demographer, Clarissa was responsible for the primary data collection for the 2010, 2011, and 2012 Texas Population Estimates and Projections Program. While working at the Institute of Demographic and Socioeconomic Research, Clarissa gained experience in program evaluation and conducting needs assessments for local non-profit organizations. Most recently, Clarissa was as an institutional research analyst for the Alamo Colleges community college district where she lead the Achieving the Dream reporting process and built several online dashboards for institutional indicators of student success. Clarissa is a doctoral candidate of Applied Demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio with her dissertation research focusing on Latina/o educational attainment and higher education policy issues. She has a Master’s of Arts in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio and a Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Texas at Austin in Human Development and Family Science. Clarissa holds three Texas teaching certifications in elementary, secondary and special education in addition to an EC-12 Principal certification.