Ronnie Lopezcepero
Head of School, Washburn School | Ed.D. Candidate | Researcher in Bilingual Education, Translanguaging & Educational Neuroscience | College Counselor
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Ed.D. candidate · M.Ed. · M.S. HRD) • University of Oslo, Norway (International Education & Development)
Mr. Ronnie Lopezcepero has been a key member of the Washburn School team since 2009, serving in teaching and leadership roles. In 2013 he pursued master’s studies at the University of Oslo in Norway, and from 2015–2017 he completed multiple master’s degrees at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, earning scholarships or full funding for all of his studies, while continuing to support Washburn remotely. He returned in May 2017 as Head of School.
Experience Beyond Washburn
At the University of Illinois, Mr. Lopezcepero served as a graduate research assistant in the College of Education (Higher Education), led international student outreach and programming at the Counseling Center for two years, and was a consultant with Illinois Business Consulting — including an international client project in Panama City, Panama. He was elected president of the Illinois Higher Education Student Association (HESA) and a member of the Illinois Student Senate.
He remains active as an accreditation reviewer, teacher development, and educational policy work in southern Puerto Rico.
Business Consultant: Illinois Business Consulting - Panama City, Panama 
President of Illinois Higher Education Student Association
Educational Leadership
As Head of School, Mr. Lopezcepero has led Washburn School — a Cognia-accredited, nonprofit, PreK–12 English-immersion, college-preparatory school in Ponce, Puerto Rico — through growth from approximately 190 to more than 300 students, while maintaining Cognia accreditation, launching an Advanced Placement (AP) program, and expanding athletics and co-curricular life.
Teaching
Mr. Lopezcepero has designed and taught high school electives including Personal Finance(currently, for 11th grade), Neuroscience, and Health. He has also taught conversational English to adult professionals through the Washburn English Institute, working with pharmaceutical companies across Puerto Rico.
College Counseling & Student Outcomes
As Washburn’s lead college counselor since 2015, Mr. Lopezcepero has guided students to more than $51 million in scholarship and grant offers and acceptances at Yale, Brown, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Swarthmore, Haverford, Georgia Tech, Michigan, UVA, NYU, Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern, Purdue, Villanova, Penn State, UConn, WPI, and — internationally — the University of Toronto. His college access work centers on financial aid advocacy, scholarship strategy, and admissions guidance for bilingual and first-generation families in Puerto Rico.
Doctoral Research
His dissertation, The Role of Translanguaging in Mathematics English Medium Instruction Classrooms for Emergent Bilingual Students, examines how emergent bilinguals in Puerto Rico use their full linguistic repertoires to learn mathematics in English-medium instruction (EMI)settings — and how teachers’ beliefs shape that process. It is grounded in translanguaging theory as a framework for how language is stored and accessed in the bilingual brain: the view, supported by neuroimaging research (Dumrukčić, 2022), that bilinguals operate from one integrated linguistic system rather than two separate ones. Situated in Puerto Rico’s distinctive sociolinguistic context, his work contributes a Caribbean perspective to the global EMI literature.
At its core, his work asks how languages live in the brain, bridging educational neuroscience and applied linguistics to understand how bilingual learners store, access, and transfer knowledge across languages, and how those processes translate into reading outcomes, biliteracy development, and mathematics achievement. An emerging third strand examines the role of artificial intelligence in global education, particularly for bilingual learners in under-resourced contexts.
Research & Scholarship
Across his graduate work at the University of Oslo and the University of Illinois, Mr. Lopezcepero has authored more than 20 research papers spanning five strands: translanguaging & EMI; educational neuroscience & bilingual cognition (including neuroplasticity and second language learning); college access & equity for bilingual, Hispanic/Latino, and underrepresented students; international & higher education (including two studies of the University of Puerto Rico); and leadership, human resource development & the future of work.
translanguaging, bilingual brain, one linguistic system, English-medium instruction, EMI, teachers’ beliefs, emergent bilinguals, bilingual education, bilingual mathematics education, biliteracy, reading outcomes, mathematics achievement, educational neuroscience, languages in the brain, neuroimaging, neuroplasticity, second language acquisition, applied linguistics, Caribbean EMI research, artificial intelligence in education, AI in global education, personal finance education, neuroscience elective, University of Oslo, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, K–12 educational leadership, Head of School, college counseling, college access and equity, Puerto Rico, Ponce.
