The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute offer a unique program aimed at cultivating human capital within the education-policy sector. The Emerging Education Policy Scholars (EEPS) program brings newly minted Ph.D. scholars and Ph.D. candidates who bring to the table a keen research eye, fresh ideas, and boundless (or budding) enthusiasm for education policy to our nation’s capital to meet with education-policy experts and to share and brainstorm exciting new directions for K–12 education research. The program focuses on three over-arching goals:

  • To foster an opportunity for talented, promising scholars to connect with other scholars in their field, as well as to introduce them to key players in the education-policy arena;
  • To expand the pool of talent and ideas from which the education-policy arena currently draws; and
  • To increase understanding of how the worlds of policy and practice intersect with scholarly research in education and related fields.

For more information about the EEPS program, please contact program coordinator Victoria McDougald. 

Class of 2015-16

Dominique Baker   Doctoral candidate, Higher Education Leadership and Policy, Vanderbilt University

Peter Bergman   Assistant professor of economics and education, Teachers College, Columbia University Senior Research Associate at the Community College Research Center

Chris Curran   Assistant professor of public policy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) School of Public Policy

Michael Ford   Assistant professor of public administration, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh (UWO)

Chloe Gibbs   Assistant professor of economics, University of Notre Dame

Christopher Harrison   Postdoctoral fellow, National Center for Research in Policy and Practice at Northwestern University

Ayesha Hashim   Doctoral candidate, urban education policy, University of Southern California

Alice Huguet   Postdoctoral fellow, Northwestern University

Dongwoo Kim   Postdoctoral fellow, Department of Economics, University of Missouri at Columbia

Constance Lindsay   Professorial lecturer, School of Public Affairs at American University

Michael Manderino   Assistant professor of adolescent literacy and Co-director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language and Literacy (CISLL), Northern Illinois University

Madeline Mavrogordato   Assistant professor of K-12 educational administration, College of Education at Michigan State University

Meredith Richards   Assistant professor of education policy and leadership, Simmons School of Education and Human Development at Southern Methodist University

Andrew Schaper   Senior associate at Basis Policy Research

Janie Scull   Doctoral candidate, quantitative methods, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

Adela Soliz   Fellow, Brookings Institute’s Brown Center on Education Policy 

Daniel Stuckey   Doctoral candidate in education policy, University of Pennsylvania

Lindsay Weixler   Senior Research Fellow, the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans

Stephani Wrabel   Doctoral candidate in urban education policy, the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education