Cordelia Candelaria is a Regents Emeritus Professor with the School of Transborder Studies. Most recently, she has developed a program called People-Power Undergoing Life Sustaining Education — PULSE — that provides workshops for ASU faculty and students to integrate fact-based reasoning into their analysis and decision-making in areas such as diversity, law and civics. Candelaria founded the program with her $40,000 gift to the School of Transborder Studies. The donation will be used to provide 25 grant-in-aids in the amount of $500 for faculty and five $800 scholarships for students.

Candelaria served as an ASU professor from 1992–2008 for the Department of English and what is now the School of Transborder Studies. In 2007, she became the founding associate dean for strategic initiatives in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to advance transdisciplinary diversity programs. Embracing diversity and helping others understand differences is part of Candelaria’s life work. The PULSE program is just the next step in her journey to help faculty and students understand how the past affects current life.

Candelaria was previously vice provost of academic affairs at the Downtown Phoenix campus and also has served as chair of the Chicana/o studies department (now the School of Transborder Studies). She is executive editor of the Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture and author of "Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature," which is in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, and "Chicano Poetry," both the first books on their respective topics.

Before coming to ASU in 1992, Candelaria held faculty appointments at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she was founding director of the Center for Study of Ethnicity and Race in America; Stanford University; Universidad Católica de Lima, Perú (as Senior Fulbright Scholar); and Richmond College in London. She also was a program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities and was selected 2001 Scholar of the Year by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies.