Jo Ann Martinez

Jo Ann López Martínez is a higher education leader with nearly twenty years experience in building the college pipeline and supporting student success. She currently serves as the Program Director to the Nina Mason Pulliam Legacy Scholars program, a scholarship and mentorship program dedicated to providing educational opportunities to students from vulnerable backgrounds, most of whom are first-generation college students and have high financial need. In this role, she addresses challenges for non-traditional college students and works to provide solutions by building trusting relationships with students and enhancing partnerships with student-centered community and academic leaders, and using data and research to guide initiatives. Her current praxis focuses on the development of an asset-based mentor research model that emphasizes student learning and on building a trauma-informed training model for student-facing university staff. Prior to her current responsibilities, Jo Ann contributed towards the college-going experience of hundreds of students as the Program Coordinator to the ASU Hispanic-Mother Daughter Program, Executive Coordinator to the ASU Barrett Summer Scholars programs, and as a Program Advisor at Mesa Community College.

Jo Ann has served in multiple leadership and volunteer roles in higher education and in the community, including with the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students and Arizona Immigrant Scholarship Hustle, the ASU Los Diablos Alumni Association, and several others. One of her most devoted responsibilities includes her commitment to the ASU Chicano/Latino Faculty and Staff Association where she has held several roles, including serving as President.

Jo Ann is a proud Arizonan. She was raised on an Indigenous reservation with a large migrant and immigrant population and grew up in an Arizona Mexican working-class household. She graduated from Arizona State University with three degrees, including a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology and minor in Chicana/o Studies, a Master of Education degree in Higher and Postsecondary Education, and a Doctor of Education degree in Leadership and Innovation. For her dissertation, she assessed the transition experience of students in a scholarship program through a qualitative phenomenological research study. She credits a strong supportive community at ASU for guiding her and allowing her to grow professionally. Jo Ann is married to her husband, Jose, and they have two daughters.