M. Alejandra Sorto received her Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 2004 in Mathematics Education and her Masters from the University of Texas-El Paso in 1992 in Statistics. She is currently a faculty member of the Mathematics Department at Texas State University. Her research focuses on the preparation of teachers in the area of Statistics, the impact of professional development, and comparative studies in Latin America and Africa. In particular, she is interested in developing instruments to measure content knowledge for teaching, teaching quality, and analyzing its effect on student achievement. She has worked with the governments of Chile, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Guatemala to help improve the preparation of teachers in mathematics and develop educational standards. In 2011 the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded her a CAREER research grant to investigate the Mathematics instruction of English language learners in the state of Texas.