Paloma Benavides, PhD
Senior Research Associate
Paloma Benavides, PhD, is a Senior Research Associate at ACUE, where she leads quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research to evaluate the impact of ACUE’s faculty development programs, as well as research on other topics affecting faculty and students. She graduated summa cum laude from Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile, where she earned a BA in Psychology and an MA in Counseling Psychology. She earned her PhD in Social Psychology with a focus on cross-cultural psychology from Korea University, where she studied as a recipient of the Korean Government Scholarship Program (KGSP).
Paloma’s primary research interest has focused on cultural psychology and higher education, with work spanning topics such as cross-cultural differences in identity, motivation, well-being. Her research has been published in Psychological Reports and the Korean Journal of Psychology, and she has co-authored additional work in Korean-language outlets. She has presented at national and international conferences including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the International Congress of Psychology (ICP), and the Korea Social and Personality Psychological Association. Most recently, she presented at AERA 2024 on the Meaning Extraction Method and co-authored a 2025 presentation on student perceptions of faculty using this method.
