Natalie Lacireno-Paquet is Director of Research-Practice Partnerships at WestEd. Lacireno-Paquet partners with local and state education leaders to conduct applied research and evaluation projects. Her work focuses on K–12 education policy and practice, including educator effectiveness, professional learning, family engagement, personalized learning, and other educational initiatives and evidence-based practices.
She leads the Applied Research and Peer Reviewed Research-Based Development Project work for the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Northwest. In this role, she supports partnership and project teams to conduct high-leverage, rigorous research to inform important decisions at the local and state levels. Lacireno-Paquet has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator for eight REL applied research studies, including an implementation study on school improvement and correlational studies of teacher mobility, teacher characteristics, and pathways to graduation.
In other work, Lacireno-Paquet is leading an evaluation of a multi-district effort in North Dakota to implement personalized, competency-based learning with the goal of improving outcomes for all learners. She recently completed a project to better understand the challenges to high school graduation faced by multilingual learners and an evaluation of a professional learning program to help educators engage with families of multilingual learners in more effective and culturally appropriate ways.
Lacireno-Paquet received a BA in political science from McGill University and a master’s degree in public policy and women’s studies and PhD in public policy, both from George Washington University.