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 2016-17

Anjali Adukia   Assistant professor at the University of Chicago in the Harris School of Public Policy

Jessica Alzen   Ph.D. Candidate in the Research and Evaluation Methodology program at the University of Colorado

Kaitlin Anderson   Doctoral student in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas

Christopher A. Candelaria   Assistant professor of public policy and education at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University

Albert Cheng   Postdoctoral fellow for the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University

Sarah A. Cordes   Assistant professor in educational leadership at Temple University

Timothy Drake   Assistant professor of education leadership and policy at NC State

Erica Greenberg   Research associate at the Urban Institute

Cassandra Hart   Assistant professor of education policy in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis Faculty research affiliate at the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research

Michael S. Hayes   Assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy and Administration at Rutgers University-Camden

Jonathan N. Mills   Postdoctoral fellow at the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University

Jaunelle Pratt-Williams   Education researcher in SRI International’s Center for Education Policy

Christopher Redding   Doctoral candidate in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations in Vanderbilt’s Peabody College 

Evan Rhinesmith   Doctoral candidate in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas

Benjamin Skinner   Doctoral candidate in the Peabody College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University

Elizabeth Leisy Stosich   Research and policy fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE)

Cameron Sublett   Postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Min Sun   Assistant professor in education policy in the college of education at the University of Washington, Seattle

Jessica Sutter   President of EdPro Consulting, LLC

Rachel S. White   Education policy doctoral candidate at Michigan State University