Meredith Billings is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Sam Houston State University. Prior to joining the faculty, Meredith was a postdoctoral research and teaching associate in the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia. Her research interests focus on promise programs, college affordability, state higher education finance, tuition policies, and college access programs. Meredith has worked for six years in higher education administration in the areas of institutional research, undergraduate admissions, and civic engagement. She holds a B.S. in Neuroscience from the College of William and Mary, a M.A. in Higher Education from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. in Higher Education from the University of Michigan.
Thomas Goldring is the Research Director of the Georgia Policy Labs at Georgia State University. His research interests include school finance, test-based accountability, and career and technical education. Dr. Goldring earned his Ph.D. and M.Phil., both in public policy and management, from Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, and his B.A. in economics from the University of Cambridge. Previously, he worked in technology consulting for Accenture, at a startup in San Francisco, and for a policy research firm in Oakland, CA.
Max Gross is a Researcher in the Human Services Division at Mathematica. An applied economist with a focus on labor economics, he uses large data and rigorous quantitative methods to explore how public policy can best support historically underserved populations. His research includes studies on the prevalence of child maltreatment and the relationship between foster care placement and children's outcomes, as well as on the impacts of youth employment programs and barriers faced by community college students. He is also a research affiliate at the Youth Policy Lab and the Education Policy Initiative.
Max earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan where he was an Institute of Education Sciences predoctoral fellow. Before graduate school, he earned a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Maryland.
Steven Hemelt is assistant professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the faculty at UNC, Hemelt was an IES postdoctoral research fellow at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. His fields of interest include education policy, economics of education, labor economics, and program evaluation.
In one strand of current research, Hemelt is examining the effects of different policies or programs on students' performance in high school, transition into college, and longer-run college outcomes (e.g., persistence, credit accumulation, and graduation). In a second line of work, he is exploring the impacts of K-12 accountability structures, consequences, and supports on a variety of student outcomes. In the past, Hemelt has studied the impacts of failure to make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on subsequent student achievement, the effects of additional learning time on student performance, and the usefulness of college double majors in the labor market.
Hemelt earned his PhD in Public Policy from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He holds a master and undergraduate degree in economics and a bachelor degree in Spanish.
Daniel Hubbard is an economic researcher at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) in Arlington, Virginia. At AIR, Daniel has designed and conducted a variety of randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental evaluations of educational interventions, including teacher professional development, student mentoring, block grants for literacy improvement, and intensified algebra curricula. He also serves as the quantitative lead on the calculation of teacher value-added ratings for the state of Florida, and he is part of a team of researchers working to update the What Works Clearinghouse's methodological standards for education research.
Daniel received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan, in which his fields of specialty were labor economics and development economics, with a focus in the economics of education. His dissertation used administrative data from Michigan public schools to study issues in the high school-college transition, including whether schools with higher value-added ratings prepare their graduates to succeed in college, as well as the relationship between local job losses due to plant closings and students' choices about whether and where to attend college.