Welcome

Thank you for browsing my personal website. I am a Principal Researcher at American Institutes for Research (AIR) based in San Francisco, CA. I am a methodologist with a passion for approachable and applicable quantitative methodologies. My research interests intersect education, psychology, and criminology - broadly, I'm a social science researcher and methodologist.

My passion is to improve the methods of research synthesis. We've come a long way in the last 40-ish years since a few academics galvanized the field. To think we have it all figured out is simply shortsighted: we have a lot more to streamline and get right. That's why my work focuses on improving research synthesis broadly. 

This passion for research synthesis improvement led me to my latest endeavor, as Founder and Chief Architect of the software platform MetaReviewer. Our team built a completely free - not freemium, but free - platform for research synthesists who want a simple way to capture complex studies. Since 2022, we've developed functionality to assist with creating codebooks from templates, screening and coding studies, reconciling two user records, estimating effect sizes, and managing collaborative projects. And that's just the start. My vision for MetaReviewer is an end-to-end platform for research synthesis that embeds best practices from experience conducting research syntheses. 

The next set of best practices will undoubtably come from automation. Yes I'm talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) but I'm also talking about "lower-case ai". Meaning, meta-analysis methodologists will be tasked with evaluating not only the latest breakthrough in AI, like large language models. While at the same time, we will need to evaluate tools and applications that built the latest AI. It will be through a careful and thoughtful incorporation of the latest with the understood that will democratize and revolutionize research synthesis for everyone. I intend to help shape and shepherd this new era. 

I'll do so by building off my previous work. In the past, I helped develop products, tool, and online services for the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) as Project Director and co-Principal Investigator (PI) of the Statistics, Website, and Training (SWAT) contract. I also lead and have led numerous systematic reviews and meta-analyses funded by the U.S. Department of Justice's National Intitute of Justice, the National Science Foundation, and AIR's Equity Initiative. Some examples include examining the longitudinal relations between school violence and mental health and school performance, the effectiveness of programming to reduce cyberbullying, and the effects of college aid funding on student success. I'm also fortunate to serve as Co-PI of two awards to train future meta-analysts: the meta-analysis training institute and the modern meta-analysis research institute. I've also worked to reduce publication bias, increase data sharing, and further the mission of research transparency - all in the spirit of improving the conduct of meta-analysis.  

And of course, in the past, I've served several methodologist roles. I helped to lead the design and analysis of a large-scale cluster-randomized trial impact evaluation. I've consulted on research projects that use longitudinal observational data and these have lead to a few interesting analyses. If you look closely at my CV, you will see I do some applied measurement analyses like exploratory or confirmatory factor analysis. I believe we have an obligation to try to prevent school bullying, increase positive bystander behaviors (in children, teachers, administrators, and parents), and improve academic success. These issues lend themselves to a variety of areas using traditional educational research but include the use of crime and justice and social work research. 

For the curious, I attended Loyola University Chicago through 2013, receiving my Ph.D.; then I participated in an U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Science (IES) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Peabody Research Institute within Vanderbilt University until 2015. Following the Postdoctoral Fellowship, I worked at Development Services Group, Inc. as a Senior Research Scientist. In the fall of 2017 I joined AIR. 

Feel free to contact me with questions, comments, or random thoughts.