María Figueroa is the Dean of the Education Faculty at the Universidad Externado de Colombia. The Faculty of Education offers two Master’s degrees, one in education, and the other in evaluation and quality assurance, serving 500 graduate students who are mostly teachers. María has participated as advisor on educational and assessment issues to several institutions including ICFES (Colombian Institution for Education Evaluation), the Ministry of Education of Colombia, the Ministry of Education in Dominican Republic, Teach for Colombia, and several educational foundations. She has also been involved in public policy education projects including the evaluation of the main educational project of the Colombian Ministry of Education called “Todos a aprender”. She was part also of the team that developed the new teacher evaluation system in Colombia. María previously worked as a professor and a researcher at CIFE (Center of Investigation and Formation in Education) in Universidad de los Andes, working on areas such as learning and assessment of different subjects, teacher evaluation, and evaluation of generic skills. María is a biologist and earned a Master’s degree in Education from Columbia University, and a Ph.D in Education from Stanford University.