She has also worked in the Peruvian Ministry of Education as an educational specialist on private education and, more recently, as an advisor in the Ministerial Office. She is interested in finding mechanisms to bridge the gap between academia and public administration.
Maria Fernanda holds an MPhil in Education, Globalisation & International Development from the University of Cambridge and a degree in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Peru. Her research focuses on educational topics from a sociological perspective, especially in issues involving inequality, reform and change in educational systems, and topics in private education. Her MPhil thesis, which received the Best Dissertation Award from her Faculty at the University of Cambridge, explored how the debate on the regulation of private education in Peru revelead contradictory ways of seeing education that are located in market and civil orders of worth. She has also analysed the links between pupil mobility, segregation and privatisation; and, together with Maria Balarin, the state and consequences of low-fee private schools, as well as the configuration of youth vulnerability trajectories.