People
Meet the leadership, team members, faculty affiliates, graduate students, undergraduate students, and alumni who make up the STEPP Center.
Our Leadership
Elizabeth Tipton is an Associate Professor of Statistics and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics and is on the Editorial Boards of Psychological Bulletin, Research Synthesis Methods, and Observational Studies. Her work has been funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the Raikes Foundation. While a member of the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University, Elizabeth received Early Career Awards from the American Education Research Association, the Society for Research Synthesis Methods, and the American Psychological Association. She is the 2020 recipient of the Campbell Collective’s Frederick Mosteller Award for an important contribution to the theory, method, or practice of systematic reviewing. Elizabeth received a Ph.D. in Statistics from Northwestern in 2011.
Larry V. Hedges is Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics at Northwestern University. He is Chair of the Department of Statistics, with appointments as a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, the School of Education & Social Policy the Department of Psychology, and the Weinberg School of Medicine. Larry is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Statistical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Educational Research Association. He co-founded the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness and was honored by the establishment of the annual Hedges Lecture in 2016. Larry received the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2018. Prior to Northwestern, he was the Stella M. Rowley Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980.
Chris Klanger
Research Associate
Chris Klager is a Research Associate in the STEPP Center where he directs research projects. He is interested in the translation and communication of evidence about educational programs for policymakers and practitioners. He received a Ph.D. in Education Policy from Michigan State University in 2020.
Our Team
Valerie Lyne
Research Project Coordinator
Valerie Lyne is the STEPP Center’s research project coordinator. Prior to joining Northwestern in 2008, Valerie worked as a research assistant at the University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research and the State of Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.
Elisabeth Severini
Research Study Coordinator
Faculty Affiliates
John Bullock
Associate Professor of Political Science
Areas: Experiments and Causal Inference
About John Bullock
James Druckman
Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science
Areas: Experiments, Surveys, Sampling
About James Druckman
Jessica Hullman
Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Medill School of Journalism
Areas: Data visualization, experiments, text-analysis
About Jessica Hullman
Mary McGrath
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Areas: Experiments, Meta-Analysis
About Mary McGrath
Blake McShane
Associate Professor of Marketing
Areas: Meta-analysis, Hierarchical models
About Blake McShane
Lincoln Quillian
Professor of Sociology
Areas: Meta-analysis, discrete choice, microsimulation, demographic techniques
About Lincoln Quillian
Jacob M. Schauer
Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine
Areas:
About Jacob Schauer
Bruce Spencer
Professor of Statistics
Areas: Accuracy of statistical measurements, use of statistics for policy, cost-benefit analysis of statistics, sampling methods
About Bruce Spencer
Graduate Students
Zhipeng Hou
Research interests include: systematic review, automation and meta-analysis
About Zhipeng Hou
Thomas Ippolito
Research interests include: causal inference for time series analysis, event study methodology, social statistics, and public policy research.
Tyler Maule
Research interests include: social statistics, meta-analysis, sampling, and network analysis
About Tyler Maule
Tim Ruel
Research interests include: Markov chain Monte Carlo methods
Undergraduate Students
Alumni
Karina G. Diaz
Research Specialist at University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
About Karina G. Diaz
Sarah Peko-Spicer
Researcher, American Institutes for Research
Rrita Zejnullahi
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Washington