Lutcher Brown Fellowship
Unfilled chairs and professorships are used to support recently tenured faculty and help accelerate the success of their research through fellowships. The fellowships are one-year, nonrecurring honorific appointments. Fellows are nominated by academic leadership and selected by the provost through a competitive process.
Vanessa Sansone, Ph.D.
Lutcher Brown Fellowship
Associate Professor, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
A UTSA alumna, Vanessa Sansone joined the faculty of her alma mater in 2017. Growing up in a historically underserved area of San Antonio and being a first-generation college student, Sansone’s upbringing helped influence her current research and teaching interests, which include college affordability, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and the impact of power structures and governance on the trajectories, experiences and opportunities of historically underserved students.
Sansone has authored refereed book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed publications including Review of Educational Research, Review of Higher Education, Teachers College Record, the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Leadership Studies, and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
Her research has been supported with over $3.6 million in competitive grant funding from organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Intercultural Development Research Association, and the Ascendium Education Group.
At UTSA, Sansone has chaired or been a member of multiple dissertation committees. She also serves as the Higher Education Administration M.Ed. Program Coordinator and Director of Policy for the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges (ARRC).
To help give back to the San Antonio community, Sansone served as co-founder and lead organizer of Colegio en Nuestra Comunidad. The annual city-wide college fair promotes higher education access in San Antonio’s low-income neighborhoods.
In 2020, Sansone was named one of the Top 35 Women in Higher Education by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. She is also a past recipient of several faculty fellowships/scholarships with other universities and organizations including Penn State University, Rutgers University, and the NSF.
Sansone earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership with an emphasis in Higher Education from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
