I am a PhD in Education student in the Education Policy and Program Evaluation at Harvard University. My co-advisors are Dana McCoy and Luke Miratrix and I am a member of the Settings for Early Education and Development (SEED) and Causality, Applications, and Research in Education and Statistics labs at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. If you like corny stats jokes, you can follow me on Twitter

My research

My research is situated at the intersection of early child development, psychometrics, and causal inference, with a focus on international and cross-cultural contexts. I am interested in how we use modern psychometric methods to measure important constructs related to early childhood (e.g., development and quality), how to leverage these measures to better understand the policies and programs that best support children to research their developmental potential and how to make scores interpretable to a range of relevant stakeholders. Some examples of questions I am addressing through my research are:

  • To what degree do internationally used measures of ECD capture universal vs. specific competencies in young children?
  • How can we balance statistical, conceptual, and practical needs in measurement work? 
  • What are the tradeoffs between caregiver-reported measures of ECD and direct assessements? 
  • How much do measurement model choices influence the results of causal experiments?
  • What are the best ways to communicate results in a policy-relevant manner? 

Ongoing projects

I currently work on several international ECD measurement efforts: