Dr. Melissa L. Salazar

INVITED Speaker

Dr. Salazar is the founder and the current CEO of ESCALA Educational Services Inc., a school of professional development that offers courses for faculty, staff and administrators who work in racially and culturally diverse educational settings.

Dr. Salazar has 30 years of experience supporting educators at the K-12 and college levels and is an expert in creating training courses that are relevant, practical and transformational. In her journey as an educator, she has logged over 1,000 hours observing and talking to teachers about their teaching as well as instructing more than 15 different math, science and education courses at four-year and two-year colleges in several states.

Over the last 13 years, Dr. Salazar has built ESCALA from a workshop based consultancy to a thriving school of professional development that now employs 5 women of color and offers training on equity, culture, and best practices in teaching to staff, faculty and administrators in HSIs. To date ESCALA has delivered programming to tens of thousands of practitioners in more than 100 two- and four-year Hispanic Serving Institutions and remains the only national organization that specializes in providing workshops for the unique context of Hispanic Serving Institutions.

Currently Dr. Salazar is working on research projects investigating how institutional transformation works in culturally diverse institutions through professional development and is collaborating with the Center of Minority Serving Institutions and Dras. Rebecca Perdomo and Stephanie Aguilar-Smith on the impact of the loss of discretionary funding on HSI staff and students.