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 2020–2021
Andrew Bacher-Hicks
Assistant Professor in the Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development
Joshua Bleiberg
Post-Doctoral Research Associate in School Reform at the Annenberg Institution
Carycruz M. Bueno
Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute and The Policy Lab at Brown University
Christopher Cleveland
Ph.D. Candidate in Education Policy and Program Evaluation at Harvard University
Jonathan E. Collins
Assistant Professor of Education and Political Science (by courtesy) at Brown University
Elise Dizon-Ross
Post-Doctoral Scholar at the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley
Walter G. Ecton
Ph.D. Candidate in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College
Jessica Goldstein
Distinguished Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas
Chuanyi Guo
Postdoctoral Scholar in the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Kentucky
Erica Harbatkin
Postdoctoral research associate at the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC) at Michigan State University
Sarah Kabourek
Research Scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago
Kate Kennedy
Ph.D. candidate in Urban Education Policy at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education
Jenna W. Kramer
Associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation
Matthew Lenard
Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Melissa Arnold Lyon
Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University
Christopher R. Marsicano
Assistant Professor in the Educational Studies Department and Founding Director of the College Crisis Initiative (C2i) at Davidson College
James Paul
Distinguished Doctoral Fellow at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform
Christine M. T. Pitts
Manager of Research and Evaluation at Portland Public Schools
Angela R. Watson
Senior Research Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy
Haisheng Yang
Senior Analyst at Abt Associates