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 Jeanette Luna.

EEPS Class of 2023–2024

Hannah Acheson-Field

Policy researcher at Abt Associates with a Ph.D. in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Anthony Bald

Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Johanna Bernard

Ph.D. student in Education Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education with a M.Ed. in Child Studies with a specialization in Poverty and Intervention from Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, and a B.A. in Psychology from Bowdoin College.

Jay Carter 

Senior research associate in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute and the Team Lead for the Education Data.

Lauren Covelli

Associate Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation.

Kari Dalane

Data Analyst at the New Jersey Department of Education.

Tasminda (Tasmin) K. Dhaliwal

Assistant Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University.

Andrew R. Diemer

Doctoral candidate at Saint Louis University studying Education Policy & Equity.

Elc Estrera

Director of Data Strategy and Analytics at the Wake County Public School System.

Alexis Gable

Ph.D. candidate in Education Policy and Program Evaluation at Harvard University.

Shirin Hashim

Advanced Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Blake H. Heller

Assistant Professor at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs.

Mario Jackson

Doctoral candidate in the Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development program at North Carolina State University.

Alison Heape Johnson

Distinguished Doctoral Fellow in the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, working toward a Ph.D. in education policy.

Mary Laski

Research principal at the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University and a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University.

Katharine Parham Malhotra

Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Virginia's EdPolicyWorks Center– a collaboration between the School of Education and Human Development and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

Melanie S. Meyer

Lecturer in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Baylor.

Sarah Ruth Morris 

Doctoral candidate at The University of Arkansas, anticipated Ph.D. in May 2025.

Francisco Arturo Santelli

Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University's Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations. 

Mary Smith

Ph.D. student in the Education Leadership and Policy Studies program at Vanderbilt University, Peabody College.