María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán is a qualitative Senior UX researcher for the Data and Insights team at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her PhD is Comparative Literature from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her industry research approach and philosophy is human-centered, which for her means to have inclusive practices, for instance using language as a tool for accessibility and not for gate-keeping. In her academic research, she focuses on definitions of blackness in Afro-diasporic literature in the Caribbean and Latin America. Before attending Rutgers, María Elizabeth earned a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Classical Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) Hunter College. In addition to her scholarly work, María Elizabeth devotes time translating documents from English to Spanish and vice versa for different community organizations in New York City, Philly and New Jersey, and mentors young Latinx students in applying for college and financial aid. Her experience of immigrating from the Dominican Republic as an adolescent informs her commitment to diversity and equality within formal and informal spaces where knowledge is shared.
