Dana Charles McCoy is a 5th year doctoral student in the Psychology and Social Intervention program in Applied Psychology. The title of Dana’s dissertation is “Child Self-Regulation in the Context of Poverty-Related Environmental Risk,” which explores the ways that low-income children's exposure to family instability and community violence affect the development of their cognitive, behavioral, and emotional self-regulatory skills.  Dana is also interested the use of experimental and quasi-experimental methods for informing evaluation of early childhood interventions, programs, and policies.  She received her A.B. in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College.  Her advisors are Cybele Raver and Pamela Morris.

Sharon Wolf  is a 5th year doctoral student in Psychology and Social Intervention in Applied Psychology. Her research is driven by the application of the bioecological framework to understanding the mechanisms through which families and schools operate to affect children to inform policy and practice.  In particular, her interests lie in applying such frameworks to design and test interventions aimed at improving these settings. Her work has been focused primarily in two areas: (a) the family economic context and the affects for children’s academic and behavioral outcomes, and (b) the relationship between educational contexts and children’s academic achievement. She is interested in applying quantitative methods to nationally representative datasets, and in evaluation research, in an effort to inform policy. Her dissertation focuses on the effects of a conditional cash transfer program in New York City on adolescents and their families, and is titled "Drawing on Psychological Theory to Understand and Improve Antipoverty Policies: The Case of Conditional Cash Transfers."  Her advisor is Larry Aber, and her IES-PIRT mentors are Larry Aber and Pamela Morris.

Christine Baker-Smith is a 2nd year doctoral student in Sociology of Education and an IES-PIRT predoctoral fellow and Research Assistant at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools. She holds an EdM from Teachers College, Columbia University in Leadership, Policy and Politics, an MA from Stanford University in the Social Sciences of Education and received her BA in Sociology from Whitman College. Her interests are in academic engagement/disengagement, transitions across educational structures such as from middle to high school and the delinquency that may manifest from unsuccessful transitions. Previously, Christine worked as the Program Coordinator and Research Assistant for the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences MA program at Columbia University.

Vanessa Coca is a 2nd year doctoral student in the Sociology of Education program at Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at NYU and a Research Assistant at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools.

Prior to pursuing her doctorate, Vanessa worked as a research analyst at the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago for almost eight years. At the Consortium, she spent most of her tenure there studying the college planning decisions of successive cohorts of Chicago Public School graduates and broader issues of college readiness. She is the co-author of a number of Consortium reports including: From High School to the Future: Potholes on the Road to College and From High School to the Future: Making Hard Work Pay Off.

 Vanessa’s research interests include transitions to college, college choice, and the post-secondary experiences of first-generation college students. She received her Master of Public Policy degree and Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Chicago.

Maia Connors is a 2nd year doctoral student in the Psychology & Social Intervention program at NYU Steinhardt. Her research interests include early care and education policy, large-scale systems' support of high quality early education and teachers' professional growth, and adults' support of young children's development. Originally from Rhode Island, Maia received her A.B. in Sociology and Education Studies from Brown University. After graduating, she spent several years in San Francisco as a Research Assistant at WestEd, a non-profit education research organization, designing and implementing programs and resources to support high quality preschool throughout California. Currently, she is collaborating with researchers at NYU, Harvard, and MDRC as part of the Secondary Analysis of Variation in Impacts of Head Start (SAVI) Center to understand the features of Head Start centers, children, families, neighborhoods, and policy contexts which contribute to variation in program impacts . Maia's advisor and research mentor is Pamela Morris.

Michah W. Rothbart is a 2nd year doctoral student in NYU Wagner.  He serves as a Graduate Assistant in NYU's Institute of Education and Social Policy (IESP). Michah's research interests lie in public finance, public education, and particularly in resource allocation in education funding. Michah previously served as the Director of Research and Evaluation at the Office of Postsecondary Readiness in the N.Y.C. Department of Education and before that as an Oak Ridge Fellow in the U.S. Department of Commerce: Economic Development Administration. He received a Master of Public Administration from Cornell University concentrating in Finance and Fiscal Policy.  Michah’s research mentors are Amy Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel.

Sarah Cordes is a 3rd year doctoral student at NYU's Wagner School and a Graduate Assistant at IESP. Her main research interests include the racial achievement gap and the relationship between housing student outcomes, (both academic and non-academic). Sarah received her MPP from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in 2010, with a concentration in social policy. Prior to attending Duke, Sarah spent two years teaching middle school math in Washington, DC as part of AmeriCorps. Sarah's advisor and IES-PIRT mentor is Amy Ellen Schwartz.

Allison Friedman is a 3rd year doctoral student in Applied Psychology at NYU Steinhardt. Her research interests include the impacts of early childhood education programs and interventions on children's development in cognitive, social-emotional, and self-regulation domains. She is also interested in how biological and environmental factors interact to influence a child's development in the context of the preschool environment. Currently she is working on projects about the bidirectional influences between child behavior problems, classroom quality, and teacher stress in preschool classrooms. Allison is also interested in the policy implications of this work. She is originally from Long Island, NY and worked at the National Institute for Early Education Research before coming to NYU. Allison's research mentors are Cybele Raver, Clancy Blair, and Pamela Morris. 

Jeannie Kim is a 3rd year doctoral student in Sociology at NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Her interests broadly cover education, race, and religion. More specifically her research looks at changes in student learning over time across high school and college settings, community supports in learning, and the impact of teacher perceptions on student academic experiences. She received her Ed.M from Harvard Graduate School of Education and worked as a teacher for 4 years prior to beginning her doctoral program. Jeannie's advisor is Florencia Torche and her IES-PIRT mentor is Richard Arum.

Meghan McCormick is a 3rd year doctoral student in the Psychology & Social Intervention program at NYU Steinhardt and a research assistant at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools. Originally from New Jersey, Meghan received her A.B. in public and international affairs from Princeton University in 2007. After graduating, she spent three years as a research assistant at MDRC, a non-profit social policy research organization, working to implement and evaluate a large-scale randomized trial of a relationship education intervention. Meghan's current research examines how interpersonal relationships and social processes both within and outside of schools influence students' academic and socio-emotional development. In addition, she is interested in applying innovative quantitative methodologies to the study of causal questions and the evaluation of programs and policies implemented in K – 12 schools. Meghan's research mentor is Elise Cappella.

Emilyn Ruble Whitesell is a 3rd year doctoral student at NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a Graduate Assistant at the Institute for Education and Social Policy. Emi is concentrating in in education policy and finance, and she is particularly interested in how school policies affect students, teachers, and  communities. Before coming to NYU, Emi taught high school English as a Teach For America corps member in Indianapolis. Emi holds a Master's of Arts in Teaching from Marian University and  B.S. in business from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. Her advisors are Leanna Stiefel and Amy Schwartz.

Jonathan Bearak is a 3rd year doctoral student in NYU's Sociology Department.  Exploring how social status impacts socioeconomic stratification, Jonathan's research emphasizes qualities not assigned at birth, such as physical attractiveness and motherhood, in addition to the qualities of one's parentage, such as race and, during childhood, socioeconomic class. Jonathan applies quantitative methods to investigate the reproduction of inequality in education, health, economics and sexuality.

Paula England is Jonathan’s adviser; Jennifer Jennings is his IES-PIRT research mentor.

Jessica Boccardo is a 4th year PhD student in Public Policy at NYU. Currently, as an Institute for Education Sciences pre-doctoral fellow, she is also working at the Institute of Education and Social Policy (IESP) on research related to education and health in NYC public high schools.  Her primary areas of interest are education policy analysis and applied microeconometrics. She is primarily interested in understanding the effect of different school reforms on varied student outcomes as well as combining research from labor, health and education economics. Prior to entering NYU, she received her Master in Public Policy from Georgetown University in 2006, where she was a research assistant for the evaluation of the first federally-funded school voucher program. She also worked at the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) unit at the World Bank, and  at the Inter-American Development Bank for the Office of Evaluation (OVE).

Rachel Cole is a 4th year doctoral candidate in the International Education program in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions. She is interested in intergenerational transfer of educational attainment and school quality measurement in Sri Lankan education. She taught for six years and was an administrator in NYC schools for two years, completing a MS in Education at Bank Street and in Educational Administration at Baruch.  In her apprenticeship with Jim Kemple of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools she did an evaluation of School of One and worked on analyses of the NYC Schools Survey and the Achievement Reporting and Inovation System (ARIS).

Justina Kamiel Grayman is a 4th year doctoral student in the Psychology and Social Intervention program. Justina's research interests include community empowerment, community organizing (especially education organizing), and collective action. Specifically, she is interested in how social contexts impact people's attitudes about social justice and their propensity to engage in collective action. Her dissertation will examine  organizing strategies that are most effective at mobilizing parents to fight for public education reform in New York City. Justina's faculty mentor is Dr. Erin Godfrey. She is currently working with Dr. Godfrey on a project examining the relationship between classroom climate and adolescents' political attitudes. She has also worked at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools.

Alexandra Ursache is a 4th year doctoral student in the Developmental Psychology program in Applied Psychology. Her research focuses on the development of cognitive and emotional self-regulation skills in early and middle childhood.  Specifically, she is interested in how low income children’s home and school environments impact the development of self-regulation through their shaping of stress physiology and other biobehavioral systems. She received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from McGill University and her Ed.M. in Mind, Brain, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Her research advisors are Clancy Blair and Cybele Raver.