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 2017-18

Richard Blissett   Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Leadership, Management, and Policy at Seton Hall University

Erica Blom   Research Associate, Urban Institute

Travis Bristol   Assistant Professor at Boston University

Christian Buerger   Assistant Professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

Susan Bush-Mecenas   Doctoral Candidate at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education

Christopher Doss   Associate Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation

Leslie Finger   Lecturer on government and social studies at Harvard University

Leesa Foreman   Doctoral Candidate and distinguished doctoral fellow in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas

Sofoklis Goulas   Senior Research Associate at CREDO at Stanford University

Monica Hernandez   Postdoctoral fellow at the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University

Bradley Marianno   Doctoral Candidate in urban education policy at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education

Anna Markowitz   Postdoctoral Research Associate at the EdPolicyWorks Center at the University of Virginia

Amelia Peterson   Doctoral Candidate in education policy and program evaluation at Harvard University

Jay Plasman   Doctoral Candidate at the University of California Santa Barbara

Courtney Preston   Assistant Professor of educational leadership and policy at Florida State University

David M. Quinn   Assistant Professor of K-12 Education Policy at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California

Lauren Schudde   Assistant Professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas in Austin

Elizabeth Setren   Postdoctoral Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Sivan Tuchman   Research Analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE)

Katie Vinopal   Assistant Professor at Ohio State University