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Christabel Cruz is the Director of National Education for Women's (NEW) Leadership™, a national program that engages college women in political leadership, at the Center for American Women and Politics, a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. Christabel is also a current Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science at Rutgers -New Brunswick where she is majoring in Women & Politics and minoring in American Politics and Race & Ethnicity Politics. Her graduate research explores Latina candidate emergence and political ambition in local ethnic politics and has received funding from the Latino Studies Research Initiative and the School of Graduate Studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick as well as the Latino Caucus of the American Political Science Association. Christabel has previously worked as a part-time lecturer and teaching assistant at Rutgers-New Brunswick, where she has taught various political science courses, including Women & American Politics, as well as pedagogical courses for college instructors. She has additionally worked in undergraduate student affairs at Rutgers- New Brunswick for many years in the offices of First-Year Engagement, Learning Communities, and Multicultural Engagement. She graduated with a B.A. in Political Science and Art History from Rutgers-New Brunswick in 2011, where she was an Eagleton Institute of Politics Undergraduate Associate and a James Dickson Carr Scholar. She received a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers-New Brunswick in 2013. In her free time, Christabel is a visual artist and writer and coordinates community workshops for young people of color on political expression through the arts.