A proud McNair Scholar, Abraham “Abe” Peña has always been passionate about serving as resource for first-generation, low-income, and other students from backgrounds similar to his own. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Academic Access and Opportunity & Principal Investigator of the Federal TRIO Programs at Suffolk University – Boston. In this position, Dr. Peña oversees the institution’s initiatives and programming to support first-generation and low-income high school students, undergraduates, and military veterans with aspirations for college and graduate school.
Born in the U.S. to immigrant parents, Dr. Peña’s childhood was spent navigating the Texas-Mexico borderlands as he worked to make sense of his multiple identities, support his family in overcoming the linguistic barriers they encountered, and prepare to be the first to finish high school and attend college. With determination and a mountain of support from teachers and administrators at his local high school, he went on to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Learning and Development at the University of Texas at Austin, where he graduated in 2009. Given his involvement and history of service to the institution, he was awarded the President’s Leadership Award and made a lifetime member of the Texas Exes Alumni Association that summer.
Dr. Peña’s involvement with the McNair Program as an undergraduate student, as well as his research on Latinx college students’ sexual and ethnic identity, led him to pursue a doctoral degree at Florida State University. He quickly developed relationships with faculty, staff, and peers and worked to increase first-year graduate student support and diversity in the department. During his time at FSU, he served on various graduate student and departmental committees, helped establish and grow the department’s graduate student peer mentorship program, and engaged in cross-disciplinary scholarship which resulted in awards, publications, and the development of an undergraduate course – Sociology of Latin@ Sexuality – that he later taught in the department. In recognition of his many contributions to the department, he was honored with the Award for Outstanding Commitment and Support to the Department of Sociology in 2012, the first of its kind.
After what he describes as a “grueling, but worth-it” experience, Dr. Peña completed his PhD in Sociology in the Fall of 2017. By that time, he was already holding a full-time job in the Boston Area. The move to the Northeast resulted in several different administrative work opportunities that allowed him to integrate his scholarship on student identity with his passion for student support, especially as it relates to first-generation and underrepresented student populations in higher education. In his current role at Suffolk University he oversees the same family of programs and initiatives that first introduced him to the possibility of higher education and doctoral study. He has been responsible for obtaining a national First-Gen Forward designation for Suffolk University and developing the first Director of First-Generation Student Initiatives position in New England. Recently, he also secured almost $5 million in federal TRIO grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education to continue to provide educational opportunity programs and college access services to low-income and first-generation students in the Boston area over the next 5 years.
Given his expertise in college access and educational opportunity programs, Dr. Peña recently established a consulting business – A Pena PhD LLC – to support institutions and individuals doing this work. He has continued to teach coursework in sociology and education studies, and he even completed an MS in Business Analytics at Suffolk University in 2021…for fun (after all, he was a qualitative researcher whose favorite class was Dr. Miles Taylor’s Advanced Quant Methods, so why not!?). He is an advocate of life-long learning and is committed to amplifying the voices of students from underserved communities. He believes that it is only by understanding the narratives and experiences of all students that we can make higher education a more equitable and inclusive space.