Education
Teachers College at Columbia University | New York, NY
EdD in Science Education | May 2018
Pace College | New York, NY
MA in Education | June 2007
Washington University in St. Louis | St. Louis, MO
BS in Earth & Planetary Sciences (minor: Physics) | May 2014
Experience
EL Education | Director of Internal Research
July 2022 - present
Math for America | Program Officer, Education Researcher
August 2015 - July 2022
NYC Public Schools | Science Teacher
Sept 2005 - August 2015
My Journey from Classroom to Research
I am a scientist by training; I worked in seismology and geochemistry labs through college, majored in Earth and Planetary Sciences, and even in my later years as a teacher, I would take coursework in the evening on sedimentary geology and spend summers working in a climate lab to keep my skills fresh. I was always drawn to the geosciences, in large part for the ways in which they sought to make sense of the world around us, and in particular the ways in which it could be done with a quantitative bent. In spite of pursuing a doctorate in education, my elective courses were entirely in upper level geochemistry and statistics.
I have taught for nearly the entirety of my pre-teen and adult life, as a swimming instructor in high school, a tutor of students with autism in college, and during my gap year, I struggled to convince myself that science was my calling. In the end, I applied for and became a Teach for America teacher, being placed in the South Bronx. A two year commitment became a ten year calling; I helped found a middle school in Harlem, where I taught Regents Earth Science to 8th graders and was certified to teach a College Geology class to upperclassmen. During this time, I started to dabble in expanding my impact outside of the classroom by designing and facilitating professional development, which became my next calling.
I left the classroom as an organization’s first Program Officer for Science Education, responsible for building partnerships and designing opportunities for over one thousand public school STEM teachers in NYC. In order to meet the needs for a diverse community, it was also at this point that I started leveraging data science, the Salesforce infrastructure that we were working in, and surveys to best tailor the catalog to the audience that existed. I finished my doctorate at Teachers College, and applied that by starting the organization’s first Research Department, where we won our first research grant (a DRK-12 grant on the intersection of curricular materials, video cases and professional development in mathematics). I loved the opportunity to build from scratch, and to also start working within R.
I was really fortunate to be given a long runway at Math for America when they decided to find external evaluators to continue the work I had started, and I used that time to look into a few organizations before ending up at EL Education, a nonprofit that takes a full school approach to student achievement reflective of their founding as a collaboration between Outward Bound and Harvard Graduate School of Education. Here, I do work in internal program evaluation and in improvement science, helping provide informal and formal data tools (measurement and analysis) that align with our mission. It is also here that my work in R has flourished, a big reason I wanted to start this blog up again.