The dominant frameworks in American politics share an assumption: that liberal democracy is the baseline of the American project and racial exclusion is a deviation from that design. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if the system is working exactly as it was built to work?

Answering these questions has meant building new tools. Dr. Grijalva develops computational methods, including interpretable machine learning and novel measurement frameworks, to reveal what conventional approaches cannot. Her work bridges unsupervised and supervised learning with democratic theory and political behavior, producing both new ways of seeing the system and new ways of understanding the people living inside it. 

Dr. Grijalva is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she serves as Co-Principal Investigator of a $100,000 Democracy Initiative Catalyst Grant and is leading interdisciplinary research on multiracial democracy. She currently has one solo-authored article at revise-and-resubmit at PS: Political Science & Politics and three more under review at Politics, Groups, and Identities, Political Psychology, and Political Science Research and Methods.

Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She has developed original courses on Latino leadership and applied leadership at Notre Dame, and mentors students through ICPSR's diversity initiative.

Her co-authored work with Luis Fraga analyzing Latino support for Trump in 2024 was published in APSA's Political Science Now post-election series (2025).

Born and raised in South Tucson, Arizona, Dr. Grijalva began her academic journey at Pima Community College. She transferred to the University of Arizona, graduating magna cum laude, before earning her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2024 and is currently on the academic job market.