OUR TEAM
Stela Radovanovic
Executive Director
Rachel Hoff
Chief Learning Officer
Yuderquis Santos
Bilingual Spanish Consultant
Emily Phillips Galloway
Research Partner
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Stela Radovanovic is a dedicated leader in the field of education with a focus on multilingual learners. Most recently, she served as Executive Director for Research, Instruction, and Professional Learning in the NYC Department of Education’s Division of Multilingual Learners (DML). Throughout her career, she has supported teachers and administrators through professional development and created instructional resources tailored to multilingual learners.
Stela co-founded Language Unity Collaborative: Educational Solutions (LUCES) out of a deep conviction that research-driven practices must be accessible to schools and educators serving diverse students. She wanted to create a bridge between research and classroom practice, ensuring that educators are equipped to provide all multilingual learners with meaningful access to grade-level content. Central to this vision is her belief that literacy and language development must go hand in hand for multilingual learners to thrive.
Over the course of 30 years working in New York City public schools, Stela led and supported major literacy initiatives that expanded opportunities for NYC students. Her work consistently centered on the intersection of literacy and language development, ensuring that multilingual learners could build strong literacy skills while continuing to grow in their home and new languages. She also guided work in large bilingual programs in Spanish and Vietnamese, as well as English as a New Language (ENL) settings. These experiences have deepened her belief that multilingual learners—regardless of proficiency—are capable of rigorous, grade-level engagement. This vision continues to guide her work and serves as the foundation of LUCES’s mission to empower educators and students in NYC and beyond.
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Rachel brings an impressive 28 years of transformative experience within the NYC Public Schools system, where she has dedicated her career to enhancing academic opportunities for multilingual learners. Her journey began as a founding teacher at a high school tailored for newly arrived students, where she first grasped the intricate needs of adolescent multilingual learners.
At both district and central levels, Rachel spearheaded initiatives aimed at supporting Students with Interrupted Education (SIFE), including the management of an annual $3.1 million grant distributed to schools across New York City. This initiative harnessed the collective expertise of educators, creating robust academic and social-emotional supports crucial for student success.
Rachel supported collaborations with local and national experts to create the first national SIFE screener and accompanying curriculum resources. These tools are designed to recognize and build on the unique strengths and assets SIFE students bring to the classroom, all while accelerating their language and content development.
Her problem-solving approach is particularly unique, as she skillfully identifies opportunities for increasing internal capacity within school communities, empowering leaders and teachers to play their vital roles in advancing multilingual learners’ achievements. Rachel’s leadership within the K-12 literacy team of the Division of Multilingual Learners has been pivotal, fostering professional development and resource creation for English as a New Language (ENL) and bilingual programs.
Believing in the power of collaboration, Rachel actively engages with researchers, community organizations, and expert partners to achieve common goals. Her recent advocacy for multilingual learners within NYC Reads, one of the city’s largest educational initiatives, best reflects her commitment to ensuring that every student has the opportunity to thrive in a supportive and enriching environment.
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With over 28 years of experience in New York City Public Schools, Yuderquis has held a variety of key roles, including teacher, literacy coach, assistant principal, and Citywide Director of Bilingual Curriculum and Instruction. Throughout her career, she has led transformative initiatives to establish and sustain bilingual education programs, working alongside experts and developing comprehensive internal resources to support these efforts.
Yuderquis is a sought-after speaker on bilingual education and has presented at prestigious conferences such as NABE, NYSABE, the Council of Great City Schools, and the Dominican Republic National Alliance for Bilingualism.
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Emily Phillips Galloway is a professor in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development. Her research examines how young people develop the language resources needed to understand complex texts, communicate their ideas, and participate fully in school and society. A former middle school reading specialist, she brings classroom experience to a research program that connects studies of language and literacy development with the design of assessments, curricula, and instruction, with a particular focus on multilingual learners.
Phillips Galloway’s scholarship helps explain why literacy instruction must attend to language beyond individual words—including how sentences convey complex ideas, how texts connect information, and how writers express perspectives and build arguments. She contributed to the development and validation of the Core Analytical Language Skills Instrument (CALS-I), which makes these often overlooked dimensions of language measurable. Her quantitative research documents their relationships with reading comprehension and writing, including connections across students’ languages. Her qualitative classroom studies examine how teachers can build on students’ multilingual resources, language varieties, and experiences to support learning and agency. Across this work, she investigates how language instruction can expand students’ opportunities to learn, express themselves, and critically examine the world around them.
She leads Project TRANSLATE, a research-practice partnership that develops and studies literacy instruction grounded in multilingual students’ linguistic and cultural strengths. Its freely available curriculum engages students in collaborative translation, discussion, and close examination of language to deepen English reading comprehension. Developed with educators, TRANSLATE provides practical ways for teachers—including those who do not speak their students’ home languages—to draw on multilingualism as a resource for learning.
Phillips Galloway also serves as Director of Research, Development, and Evaluation for Vanderbilt’s Patterson Institute for Early Adolescent Literacy, where she helps lead efforts to develop, study, and refine literacy supports for students in grades 4–8. This work connects instructional development with research on students’ literacy growth and their engagement and confidence as readers and writers. She directs Vanderbilt’s Language, Literacy, Learning, and Equity (LLLE) Research Group.
Committed to making research useful to educators, she collaborates with teachers, school leaders, and district partners to translate findings into instructional tools and professional learning. She is co-author of Leading Advanced Literacy Instruction in Linguistically Diverse Schools: A Guide for Education Leaders (2016), with Nonie Lesaux and Sky Marietta, and Reimagining Language Instruction: New Approaches to Promoting Equity (2023), with Sabina Neugebauer and Christina Dobbs.
Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Journal of Educational Psychology, Reading Research Quarterly, Applied Psycholinguistics, and Reading and Writing, and has received support from the Spencer Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of State, and the Institute of Education Sciences. Her honors include the AERA-SRCD Early Career Fellowship in Middle Childhood Education and Development and Peabody College’s Faculty Excellence Award. She holds an Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an M.S.Ed. and B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.