Meet Dr. Chi Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy
Dr. Nguyen’s research is international, comparative, and interdisciplinary. Through a social justice and equity lens, she examines systemic inequities affecting students, leaders, and communities during critical periods of transition—such as following policy changes, moving from K–12 to higher education, or relocating to another country. She argues that such transitional periods often magnify and perpetuate inequities, as individuals with privileged knowledge, power, and resources are better equipped to navigate changes than those without. Yet, these liminal times and spaces also present opportunities for positive personal and professional transformation.
Specifically, the first strand of Dr. Nguyen’s research agenda examines how policy changes create transitional periods that are challenging for minoritized communities to navigate. For example, her highly cited systematic review in Educational Policy (Nguyen & Kebede, 2017) analyzes the implications of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its following changes on school choice and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policies for K-16 immigrant students during the first Trump Administration. The review highlights gaps in the literature, such as limited asset-based perspectives on immigrant students, the intersection of race and immigration status, and the experiences of immigrant students in rural areas. Dr. Nguyen is currently conducting a follow-up systematic review to assess updated policy impacts on immigrant students during the second Trump Administration. Investigating policy-driven transitional periods in international contexts, Dr. Nguyen has published extensively on how administrative and educational policy shifts influence the K–12 to higher education pathways of rural and low-income students in Vietnam (e.g., Nguyen, 2023; Nguyen, 2024; Le et al., 2025; Trinh et al., 2024). Her mixed-methods studies demonstrate that top-down policy reforms often intensify pressure on and perpetuate inequities facing rural school leaders, teachers, and students.
The second strand of her research focuses on the experiences of immigrant and international students during critical periods of transition from their home countries to the U.S. Dr. Nguyen’s ethnographic studies on Vietnamese immigrant youth in Philadelphia—published in the American Educational Research Journal (Quinn & Nguyen, 2017) and Race, Ethnicity, and Education (Nguyen & Quinn, 2018)—were praised by the editor and anonymous reviewers as “ground-breaking” for addressing both Vietnamese/Asian-Black interracial tensions and political divisions within the Vietnamese community. One of her many publications on international students’ transitional experiences is a critical qualitative study on how Korean international Christian students draw on spiritual capital to navigate white Christian nationalism in U.S. higher education (Choi et al., 2024). This article was recognized as one of the most read and trending publications of the year by the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.
The third strand of her scholarship centers on the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological development of social justice leadership and its role in supporting minoritized students through critical periods of transition. These works include Wang and Nguyen’s (2025) quantitative study using citation and co-citation network analysis to track the development of social justice leadership scholarship over 120 years (1900-2020s), published in the Journal of Educational Administration. Later this year, Dr. Nguyen is releasing another critical systematic review in the Review of Research in Education, which questions and redefines the very definition of social justice leadership (Nguyen et al., forthcoming).
Going beyond academic publications, Dr. Nguyen uses many public-facing platforms—such as YouTube videos, podcasts, blogs, and social media—to disseminate her research under the pen name “The Present Writer,” which now reaches 1.7 million followers across platforms. She is a national best-selling author in Vietnam and the creator of The Present Day planner—a scientifically proven productivity tool designed to support deep, focused work.
To learn more about Dr. Nguyen’s research, check out her Google Scholar profile.