Ashley Camarena, M.Ed. (she/her), is a joint MSW/PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work whose career bridges teaching, school counseling, and program evaluation. She began her career as an educator after completing her undergraduate degree and post-baccalaureate teaching credential at California State University, Stanislaus, and moved into counseling after seeing firsthand how classrooms lacked the social and emotional supports students needed to succeed. She earned her Master of Education in School Counseling from the University of Southern California, where her training centered on three focus areas that continue to shape her work: college and career readiness, restorative justice, and trauma-informed practice.
She has spent the past five years with Chicago Public Schools leading equity-centered programming, coordinating MTSS and Behavioral Health Teams, and providing wraparound support for pregnant and parenting students. Much of that work has been at Simpson Academy for Young Women, Chicago's only pregnant and parenting school, where she focused on bridging the gap between student mothers' needs and their access to services, social-emotional development, and post-graduation success.
At the University of Pittsburgh, Ashley's research examines how developmental processes in adolescent parents, including identity, self-regulation, and autonomy, unfold in relation to those of their young children over time, and what that co-development looks like when supported in a school-based setting. She is particularly interested in the dual position adolescent mothers occupy: simultaneously being parented by their own caregivers while parenting their own children, and how that concurrent experience shapes the co-developmental trajectory of the parent-child dyad. Her work is grounded in years of practice-based knowledge about how schools can strengthen partnerships with the families they most often exclude.
Research Interests
- Parent-Child Co-development
- Adolescent Parent Development (Identity, Self-Regulation, Autonomy)
- Parenting While Being Parented
- School-Based Supports for Pregnant and Parenting Students
- Intergenerational Wellbeing
