Sylvia Manzano,PhD

Vice President of Operations

Sylvia is Vice President of Operations and has worked in public opinion research for more than 20 years. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Arizona and was formerly a professor of political science at Texas A&M University where she taught classes on public opinion, survey methodology, American politics, and racial and ethnic politics in America.

Sylvia has extensive training in quantitative statistical analysis as well as qualitative research.
She has published numerous social science articles in leading peer review journals and has pioneered research design and question wording in survey research. Sylvia coordinates between BSP staff, clients, and vendors to produce projects.

Sylvia has extensive expertise leading projects on youth, education, parents of young children, and reproductive rights. She has led efforts to develop interactive web-tools for end-users of our data and that of clients. Sylvia has also led research reports using secondary data sources from the U.S. Census, state departments of education, health, and criminal justice, and aggregate data analysis of the voter file and voter turnout rates. In 2008, Sylvia was one of the founding principal investigators of the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), which today is the largest social science survey of Americans of all racial and ethnic groups.

Sylvia is a native Texan and completed her B.A. and M.A. in Political Science at St. Mary’s University. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Arizona.