Dr. Arash Daneshzadeh
Sam Mateo, California Advisor
Dr. Arash Daneshzadeh was the Assistant Director of Admission at Stanford University for four years and still serves as a consultant and seasonal reader to multiple admissions offices including the UC system. Dr. Daneshzadeh currently serves as the Founder and Director of Refugee Resettlement for JFCS, East Bay. Dr. Daneshzadeh (He/They) was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area (as a biracial refugee and formerly incarcerated youth) where he has served the mission of educational equity for 16 years first as a STEM teacher and later on as a practitioner of school support interventions. Arash also serves as National Chair for Save The Kids from Incarceration, a national nonprofit focused on prison abolition through health-equity frameworks of restorative justice. The crux of his project management has focused on school-sanctioned inequities and violence. Dr. Daneshzadeh has recently co-edited a textbook on the topic of youth punishment entitled Understanding, Dismantling, and Disrupting the Prison-To-School Pipeline.
Since 2013, Arash has taught classes on creating equitable organizational leadership and inclusive campus environments in the Graduate School of Education at the University of San Francisco, Stanford, CSU East Bay, and Alder Graduate Schools of Education and Health Sciences. Since 2015, he has consulted with the Alameda County Office of Education on equitable and inclusive administrative practices and creating early warning systems for interventions.
For the past seven years, Dr. Daneshzadeh has taught in the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Penitentiary. Arash's recently published research, based on his doctoral work at UC Davis, involved an ethnographic study of Black girls participating in Health-Equity oriented and trauma-informed Restorative Justice programs at a local alternative school in San Francisco, which focused on navigational and resistance capital among young Black women in local Bay Area schools.
Currently, Arash Daneshzadeh serves as Editor-In-Chief of The Transformative Justice Journal and has written a problem-based culturally-responsive curriculum for Sacramento area community colleges. For two years, Dr. Daneshzadeh was the Director of TRIO Student Support Services at Skyline College in San Bruno which has a rich history of sending many first-generation students of color into post-secondary health institutions including Samuel Merritt University.