Institute of Education Sciences Pre-Doctoral Fellows
2009 - 2010 Fellows
Ian Fillmore
Ian Fillmore graduated with undergraduate degrees in Economics and Statistics from Brigham Young University and is the recipient of numerous honors and awards. Among his awards are the Heritage Scholar (BYU) Full Tuition Scholarship) Award , Phi Kappa Phi, American Statistical Association, Statistical Honor Society and the National Merit Scholar Award. Ian is currently involved in several research projects. His research work entitled “Count Data Models: Theory and Application” written for an advanced econometrics course provided the background on several different counts of data models and allowed him to apply these models to absence data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
2008 - 2009 Fellows
Jonah Deutsch
Jreceived his BA from Wesleyan University where he majored in Government. He enters his second year in the PhD program at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Mr. Deutsch already has a substantial start on his career as an educational researcher, having worked at the prestigious Consortium on School Research for over a year. He has presented five papers at professional conferences. The primary topic of his work has been the reform of the high school curriculum in Chicago and its impact on students of varied backgrounds. He comes with a remarkably strong background in quantitative methods in education, with experience in hierarchical linear modeling, Item Response Theory, propensity score stratification, and non-linear modeling. Jonah is currently working with Professor Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach on the impacts of No Child Left Behind.
Sara Heller
Sara Heller received her BA in Psychology from Harvard University. As an undergraduate, she worked as a research assistant at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and performed original research exploring the factors that influence emotional perception. After working for several years in the arts and arts education, as well as teaching middle school students in France, she earned a Masters of Public Policy from Georgetown University. Her masters thesis examined the effects of accountability policies on noncognitive skills in Chicago Public Schools. Her research interests continue to focus both on the effects of noncognitive skills on socio-economic outcomes and on how schools shape those skills. More broadly, she is interested in how education and urban policies can reduce inequality of opportunity and encourage economic mobility.
Chloe Hutchinson Gibbs
Chloe Hutchinson Gibbs received a B.A. in government and international studies from the University of Notre Dame. She holds a master of public policy degree from the University of Michigan and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies. She has worked as a senior researcher at Learning Point Associates where she led a statewide study of extended learning time opportunities in South Carolina and managed two statewide evaluations of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program. Previously, Ms. Gibbs worked in the domestic education and workforce development group at the Academy of Educational Development in Washington, DC, conducted research on infant and maternal health in Detroit, and led an audit of homeless placement processes in New York City. Her current research includes an impact study of full-day kindergarten, employing randomized and regression discontinuity designs to explore the causal effect of full-day kindergarten participation on early literacy skills. She is also a recipient, with Stephen Raudenbush and Matthew Steinberg, of an Edmund A. Stanley, Jr. research grant from the Robert Bowne Foundation to study adolescent out-of-school time use.
Marshall Jean
Marshall Jean received his B.A. from Northwestern State University Louisiana before receiving his Masters Degree in Social Science at the University of Chicago. After graduating from Northwestern State University in 2005 Marshall spent a year teaching in the public school systems in France. At Chicago, his Master's Thesis on the school mobility of urban youth won the Division-wide competition for the best Master's Thesis of 2007-2008. This experience won him a full time job last year with the Consortium for Chicago School Research where Marshall Jean has collaborated with Stephen Raudenbush on a grant, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, on residential and school mobility. This work builds on his interest in how institutional and cultural contexts affect learning environments and educational outcomes. He joined the Sociology Department as a first-year Ph.D. student in the fall of 2008.
2007 - 2008 Fellows
Elizabeth Gunderson
Elizabeth Gunderson graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA from Yale University receiving her degree in Computer Science and Psychology in 2005. Elizabeth’s research focuses on the ways in which children’s academic trajectories are influenced by the input provided by parents and teachers. She is currently investigating what kinds of parental inputs are most helpful in preschoolers’ development of numeracy skills, as well as the role of teachers’ anxieties and gender stereotypes in elementary school students’ mathematics learning.
Daniel Kimmel
Daniel Kimmel received his AB in Sociology (with honors) and English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago College in 2006 and his AM from the University of Chicago's Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences in 2007. His research focuses on the experience of education from the student perspective. Daniel is currently pursuing a project on the effects of bullying on short- and long-term student outcomes. His theoretical interests are informed by a desire to create fresh areas for productive dialogue between the rich subfields of sociology of education and sociology of ignorance/knowledge.
Daniel Kreisman
Daniel Kreisman, a third year PhD student in Harris School of Public Policy Studies, received his BA from Tulane University and his Masters in Public Policy at University of Chicago. Before entering the Harris School’s MPP program, he taught high school English and Literature in New Orleans for three years. Daniel has worked as a research assistant at the National Opinion Research Center and with Jeffrey Grogger at the Harris School, enabling him to apply his statistical coursework to practical research problems. His primary interests involve race gaps in educational attainment, language, and earnings; he is currently investigating the effects of parental language and child care on early language acquisition.
Amy Proger
Amy Proger is a third-year doctoral student in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. She received a BS in education and social policy from Northwestern University in 2005 and an AM in social service administration from the University of Chicago in 2007. While working as a tutor/mentor at Cabrini Connections, an after-school program for high school students who live in public housing in Chicago, Amy developed an interest in using research to assess and improve policies and programs that impact the well-being of vulnerable children and families. Amy is currently working on a project examining the expansion of the Advanced Placement program in the Chicago Public Schools, with the goal of understanding the extent to which taking advanced placement courses improves students’ college outcomes. Amy is in the initial stages of her dissertation proposal and plans to write her dissertation on racial/ethnic disparities in college completion rates. Amy is currently employed as a Research Assistant at the Consortium on Chicago School Research.
Gerardo Ramirez
Gerardo Ramirez is a third year student in the Cognitive Psychology Program. His work borrows from theories of working memory and attention to understand the factors lead to poor test performance and what can be done to give students a measure of resiliency against the perils of choking under pressure. Gerardo is involved in a number of lab projects that investigate the benefits of expressive writing in improving academic performance. Additionally, he is also involved in several other school studies that explore how social stereotypes and individual differences in cognitive ability can lead to poor learning across the school year. Gerardo Ramirez remains excited to be a part of the new push to apply cognitive research into educational settings.
Matthew Steinberg
Matthew Steinberg is a third year doctoral student at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago and an Institute of Education Sciences Pre-Doctoral Fellow with the University of Chicago Committee on Education. Matthew received his BA with high distinction in Economics and Sociology from the University of Virginia and a Masters in Public Affairs from the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously, Matthew has been an investment banker and a New York City Teaching Fellow, having taught 5th grade for three years in a low-income New York City community. During his tenure as a teacher, Matthew completed a MSEd. with graduation honors in elementary education from the City College of New York and founded a non-profit tutoring company which provided individualized tutoring services to low-income students. His research interests include educational privatization and market-based educational reforms, how adolescents allocate their out-of-school time in the after-school hours, the manner in which participation in extended learning opportunities affects student academic achievement, teacher labor supply and merit-based pay initiatives, and the role of schools and school leaders in the ecology of school safety. Matthew’s previous work has explored issues of access in higher education.
2006 - 2007 Fellows
Emily Art
Emily Art is a second year student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She received her BA in Urban Studies from Wellesley College in 2002 graduating Summa Cum Laude. Emily is currently working with Professors Stephen Raudenbush, Mario Small and Micere Keels on a developmental study of how student mobility in Chicago affects school effectiveness and student outcomes. Her abiding interest in education provoked questions for the new environments as she pondered how postcolonial school systems were adapting to include cultures of indigenous populations.
Julia Burdick-Will
Julia Burdick-Will, a fourth year graduate student in sociology and graduated from the University of Chicago with honors in Sociology and Latin American Studies. Julia's research interests are education, urban structure and stratification, focusing primarily on neighborhood characteristics that impact children’s cognitive development and educational attainment. Her article entitled "Assimilation versus Multiculturalism: The Bilingual Education and the Latino Challenge" appears in the Journal of Latinos and Education. Julia is currently working with Professors Jens Ludwig and Stephen Raudenbush, on a study of neighborhood disadvantage and cognitive test scores. Julia is also working with Professor Micere Keels on a study of the association between gentrification and changes in school demographics and achievement.
Andrew Mattarella-Micke
Andrew Mattarella-Micke is a fourth year student in psychology. His research focuses on the acquisition, representation and performance of cognitive skills. This work relies on converging sources of evidence from behavior, physiology and neuroimaging to advance basic cognitive research with educational implications. For example, in a recent publication Andrew and Sian Beilock demonstrated that small changes in the wording of a math story problem can strongly bias the memory systems that people use to complete the problem. While this research informs the basic science of memory retrieval, it also carries implications for the design of math story problems on standardized tests.
Daniel Ramsey
Daniel Ramsey is a fourth year student in the economics Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago. He graduated from Harvard University and worked for the Council of Economic Advisers. He hopes to become a research professor and be involved with policy development. His research interests include methods of estimating teacher quality and developing best practices for teachers based on rigorous empirical support. He is also interested in the role of schools and teachers in the development of noncognitive skills.
2005 - 2006 Fellows
Rachel Garrett
Rachel Garrett is a fifth year doctoral student in the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy Studies. She received her BA in economics from Barnard College, Columbia University. Rachel graduated Magna Cum Laude, receiving Departmental Honors and earning Distinction on the Senior Requirement. Her thesis explored the intergenerational transmission of human capital by empirically investigating hypothesized pathways between maternal characteristics and child achievement test scores. Ms. Garrett is the recipient of the Alena Wels Hirschorn Prize for outstanding paper in economics and was awarded the Certificate of Outstanding Achievement in German Language and Literature. Since her graduation Rachel has worked as a research assistant at the Spencer Foundation for Educational Research. Rachel’s current work explores the impact of instructional content on mathematics learning over kindergarten and first grade. Her dissertation work considers the impact of children coming from multilingual households on educational trajectories, as well as the effects of instructional language.
Devon Haskell
Devon Haskell is a fifth year doctoral student in the Economics department at the University of Chicago. She received her BA with honors in economics from Dartmouth College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude. She was awarded the Nelson A. Rockefeller Prize for the outstanding economics major, earned several citations for her work in economics and statistics, and received Phi Beta Kappa honors as a junior. She developed an interest for educational research during her volunteer experiences with disadvantaged inner-city youth. As an undergraduate, she analyzed the effects of charter schools on student achievement. As a graduate student she has conducted research on the effects of high school athletic participation on student outcomes. She finds that athletic participants perform better in school and explores whether this relationship is causal. In addition, she is analyzing the height premium in the student population. She finds that taller students achieve better outcomes and her current work looks at possible mechanisms for this result.
Sally Sadoff
Sally Sadoff is a sixth year PhD student in economics at the University of Chicago. She received her BA in economics from Harvard University in 2000. After completing her undergraduate studies, Sally taught mathematics in a public high school (Fremont, CA) and a charter middle school (East Palo Alto, CA). She was the recipient of the prestigious Dan Searle Fellowship award in 2005 as well as the CharterTeach Fellowship in 2001. Sally's research focuses on closing achievement gaps beginning with pre-kindergarten development through college attendance and graduation. Sally's dissertation entitled "The Effect of Performance-Based Incentives on Educational Achievement: Evidence from Randomized Experiments" uses several field experiments to test the effectiveness of incentives on improving high school achievement. Her ongoing research includes designing performance-based incentives for elementary school teachers, and developing a pre-kindergarten program focused on intense instruction and increasing parental investment in young children.
Ginger Lynn Stoker
Ginger Lynn Stoker is a third year doctoral student in the joint AM/PhD program in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BS from Arizona State University, and its Barrett Honors College, and holds an MA in Educational Psychology, with an emphasis in Measurement, Statistics, and Methodological Studies from the University of Arizona. At Arizona State University, Ms. Stoker held a Regent's Academic Merit Scholarship and as a graduate student has held several Departmental Fellowships. Ms. Stoker has participated in several research studies, including an investigation of Title I teachers' understanding and use of standardized test scores, a validity study of the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) tests, an examination of the Chicago Academic Standards Examinations (CASE), and an evaluation of California's Early Steps program. Ginger recently finished a preliminary study on the effects of taking AP classes on academic outcomes of urban high school students and is moving forward to explore a more in-depth study on the same topic. Part of the current study will be the basis for her dissertation. Ginger is in the final stages of completing her dissertation proposal. Ginger Stoker is currently employed as a Research Assistant at the Consortium on Chicago School Research.
