Director of Research and Planning
npellegrin@peralta.edu
Nathan Pellegrin was named Director of Research and Planning in January, 2020. He is committed to enabling cycles of inquiry that reach across the campus community to bring together faculty, students and staff. Prior to joining Merritt, he consulted community colleges on key research and planning projects, including student equity, evaluation of in-class student supports, student-centered scheduling, and students right to transfer level classes in math and English (AB 705). He served as Director of Institutional Research for the Peralta Community College District from 2014 to 2016.
He started his college career as student at Mt. San Antonio College. There, Nathan took Dr. David Medina’s sociology class, which had him take a driving tour of the Los Angeles area. This was a significant horizon-expanding experience that made real to him the rich diversity surrounding him and the role that community colleges play in connecting people. He then transferred to UC Berkeley and engaged in dialogue on values, socially constructed reality and ethics as a student in philosophy. He completed three semesters of first-order logic, which sparked his interest in mathematical reasoning.
After finishing his undergraduate studies, Nathan volunteered with AmeriCorps leading service-learning projects for at-risk high school students. In that role, he learned how crucial research and data are to program design and improvement, and so jumped into conducting surveys and analyzing student data to support special programs.
At Oakland Unified School District, he worked on formative assessment systems, researched equity in attendance and discipline records, and administered the student information system. Along the way he earned his Master of Science in Statistics from Cal State East Bay. From there, he joined the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success as a researcher for five years where he supported regional partnerships between K-12 and post-secondary institutions with data on student matriculation and pathways. Nathan began his work with Peralta as a research and systems technology analyst in 2013.