COLERIDGE INITIATIVE - Key Persons
Ahu Yildirmaz is the Chief Executive Officer of the Coleridge Initiative. Prior to joining the Coleridge Initiative, she was the co-Head of the ADP Research Institute. She has more than 20 years of experience in several senior management and leadership roles, including finance, strategy, research, and data analytics. She holds a doctorate degree in economics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a bachelor's degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Missouri Department of Labor
Anna Hui was appointed Director of the Missouri Department of Labor and Industrial Relations in March of 2017 and confirmed by the Senate in January 2018, making her the first Asian American to serve in the governor's cabinet in Missouri history. For over two decades, Anna has worked in numerous senior positions in both state and federal government. Anna started her public service career working for Illinois Governor Jim Edgar as the Special Assistant to the Governor for Asian-American affairs and then for Governor George Ryan, as a senior member of the Washington, D.C. policy management team. She went on to serve as the Associate Deputy Secretary of Labor at the U.S. Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's Administration. In that role, Anna spearheaded efforts to encourage diversity and the inclusion of historically underserved communities in the Department's programs and Federal government management. After leaving federal service in 2009 and until she returned to Illinois in 2015, she was Chief of Staff to former U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. From 2015 to 2017, Anna served as Assistant Director and later as Acting Director of the Illinois Department of Labor, where she implemented major reforms in process and program efficiency and effectiveness. Anna received a J.D. from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, an M.S.M., and an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) and a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). In April 2018, she was named the recipient of UIUC's Outstanding Asian American Alumni Award from the Asian American Cultural Center for her dedication to public service. Recently, Anna was appointed to the Federal Government's Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building, as well as Chair of the State of Missouri's Interagency Task Force on Worker Classification. Additionally, she serves on the Board of the International Association of Industrial Accidents Boards and Commissions (IAIABC), the Board for the Family and Community Trust (FACT), the Advisory Board for the Missouri Science and Technology (MOST) Policy Fellowship Program, and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies' (NASWA's) Information Technology Support Center (ITSC) Steering Committee. Anna also served as the President of the National Association of Government Labor Officials (NAGLO) 2018-2020 and President of NASWA 2019-2020; she is a graduate of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce 2018 Leadership Missouri Program.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Physics and Data Science at Cal Poly State University
Brian Granger is an associate professor of physics and data science at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo. He is the Principal Technical Program Manager at Amazon Web Services. He is a leader of the IPython project, cofounder of Project Jupyter, and an active contributor to a number of other open source projects focused on data science in Python. Recently, he cocreated the Altair package for statistical visualization in Python. He is an advisory board member of NumFOCUS and a faculty fellow of the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Distinguished Research Professor
Christine L. Borgman, Distinguished Research Professor and Presidential Chair Emerita, UCLA, conducts research in scientific data practices and information policy. Her 250+ publications in information studies, computer science, communication, and law include three award-winning books from MIT Press. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Officer at the New Jersey Economic Development Authority
David Ramsay is an officer at the New Jersey Economic Development Authority whose work focuses on enhancing the State's long-term economic competitiveness. Prior to joining the Authority, he served as the Director of Workforce Research and Analytics at the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development. He has a broad range of experience in policy analysis, performance measurement, and evaluation. David earned a B.A. in Economics from Rutgers University and an M.P.A. from Seton Hall University.
Job Titles:
- Deputy Commissioner of Workforce Learning and Development for the Tennessee Department of Labor
Deniece Thomas is the Deputy Commissioner of Workforce Learning and Development for the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Thomas is responsible for the oversight of the Workforce Services, Adult Education, and WIRED divisions. Appointed Assistant Commissioner of Workforce Services division in December 2018, Thomas began her career with the state of Tennessee in 2007 at the Department of Labor and Workforce Development. She previously served in a variety of roles within the agency including Workforce Services Director 1, Workforce Services Director 2, Employment Security Manager 1, Employment Manager 3, and Employment Security Interviewer Supervisor. Thomas is a member of the National Association of State Agencies (NASWA) Board of Directors since September 2018, member of the National Employment and Training Committee and Veterans since 2015 and she serves on the National Apprenticeship Workgroup. Additionally, she also serves as the State Workforce Liaison for the National Governor's Association since January 2018, the National Association of State Workforce Association, the Governor's Economic Development Council and the State Workforce Board. Thomas is a 2014 Graduate of LEAD Tennessee Alliance 5. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Civic Leadership from Lipscomb University in Nashville and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Alabama Birmingham. She is a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
Dr. Jennifer Engle serves as a director of Data, where she leads the foundation's staff responsible for using data, measurement, learning, and evaluation to help reach our strategy goals for closing attainment gaps in order to increase social mobility and prepare the modern workforce.
Jennifer is a noted national expert, leader, and advocate in the field. From the Pell Institute to the Education Trust to the Institute for Higher Education Policy, she has focused on improving college access, affordability, and completion for underserved students throughout her career. For her, this is a professional passion that comes from her personal experience as the first in her family to go to college.
Jennifer holds both a master's and a doctorate degree in education from American University.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Senior Program Officer for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Evan Absher, senior program officer for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, works to identify ways to help cities further innovation and growth. He helps educate policymakers on new insights and understandings based on research, and provides support for the Foundation in the formation of applicable local policies and programs. Prior to joining the Foundation, Absher worked as a special assistant for Policy in the Office of Mayor Sly James, Mayor of Kansas City, Mo. Absher earned both his juris doctor and bachelor's degrees from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Frauke is a cofounder of the Coleridge Initiative, professor of Statistics and Data Science for the Social Sciences and Humanities at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Germany) and professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, where she co-directs the Social Data Science Center. Frauke is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and the 2020 recipient of the Warren Mitofsky Innovators Award of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
Janet Currie is the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and the Co-director of Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbeing. She also co-directs the Program on Families and Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is the President of the American Society of Health Economics, has served as the Vice President of the American Economics Association, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and of the American Academy of Art and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, the Society of Labor Economists, and of the Econometric Society, and has honorary degrees from the University of Lyon and the University of Zurich. She was named a Nomis Distinguished Scientist in 2018. She has served on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science, as the Editor of the Journal of Economic Literature, and on the editorial boards of many other journals. Currie is a pioneer in the economic analysis of child development. Her current research focuses on socioeconomic differences in the health and access to heal care, environmental threats to health, and the important role of mental health.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Statistical Science at Duke University
Jerry Reiter is a Professor of Statistical Science at Duke University. His primary areas of research include methods for ensuring data privacy, for handling missing and erroneous values, for combining information across sources, and for analyzing complex data in the social sciences and public policy. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is the recipient of several teaching and mentoring awards from Duke University, including the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, the Outstanding Postdoctoral Mentor Award, and the Master's of Interdisciplinary Data Science Distinguished Faculty Award. He has advised multiple government agencies on creating data products to share with the public, as well as served on multiple panels and committees for the National Academy of Sciences.
Job Titles:
- Chief Scientist
- Co - Founder
- Director
- President of the Board
Julia is a cofounder of the Coleridge Initiative and a Professor and a Provostial Fellow at NYU. She is the author or editor of 12 books and over 80 scientific articles. Julia is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Statistical Institute and the American Statistical Association. She is the recipient of the 2014 Julius Shiskin award, the 2014 Roger Herriot award and the 2017 Warren E. Miller Award.
Kaye Husbands Fealing is Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology, formerly the Chair of the School of Public Policy Georgia Tech. She specializes in science of science and innovation policy, the public value of research expenditures, and the underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM fields and workforce. Previously, she taught at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, and was a study director at the National Academy of Sciences. She developed and was the inaugural program director for the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Science of Science and Innovation Policy program and co-chaired the Science of Science Policy Interagency Task Group, chartered by the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Policy Council. At NSF, she also served as an Economics Program director. She was a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Technology Policy and Industrial Development, where she conducted research on NAFTA's impact on the Mexican and Canadian automotive industries, and research on strategic alliances between aircraft contractors and their subcontractors. Husbands Fealing is an Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and serves on the AAAS Executive Board. She was awarded the 2017 Trailblazer Award from the National Medical Association Council on Concerns of Women Physicians. She currently serves on NSF's Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering, NSF's Education and Human Resources Directorate's Advisory Committee, the General Accountability Office's Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics Polaris Council, and the Georgia Intellectual Property Alliance. She is a board member for the Society for Economic Measurement. She has served on several committees and panels, including: several AAAS committees; three National Academies' panels; two Council of Canadian Academies panels; two American Academy of Arts and Sciences working groups; NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Advisory Committee; NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences Council; and the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession. At Georgia Tech, she serves on the Institute for Data Engineering and Science Council, the Intellectual Property Advisory Board, and the Ivan Allen College Diversity Council. Husbands Fealing holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, and a B.A. in mathematics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Job Titles:
- Treasurer
- Vice Chancellor, Science Policy & Research Strategies at the University of Pittsburgh
Michael is the Vice Chancellor, Science Policy & Research Strategies at the University of Pittsburgh. He has a broad range of science policy experience in government and as an academic administrator. His government experience includes serving as Senior Advisor and Staff Director, Office of the Under Secretary for Science, U.S. Department of Energy; program examiner, Office of Management & Budget (OMB); senior policy analyst, Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP); and Chairman's designee, Energy Subcommittee, Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Board
- CEO of NAPx Consulting
Nancy Potok is the CEO of NAPx Consulting. She most recently served on the Biden-Harris Presidential Transition as part of the Commerce Agency Review Team. She is also co-chair of the American Statistical Association Task Force on 2020 Census Quality Indicators. She is a non-resident Fellow at the Urban Institute. She was Chief Statistician of the United States until January 2020, co-chairing the creation of the Federal Data Strategy and serving as a Commissioner on the bipartisan Commission for Evidence-Based Policy Making. She previously served as Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Census Bureau; Deputy Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the US Department of Commerce; Senior VP for Economic, Labor, and Population Studies at NORC at the University of Chicago; and Chief Operating Officer at McManis & Monsalve Associates, a business strategy, data analytics and organizational transformation consulting firm. She has been an adjunct professor at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA, Column Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review, on the Board of Directors of The Data Foundation, and on the Board of Visitors for the Computing and Information Science School at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the recipient of the Presidential Rank Award, the Secretary of Commerce Gold Medal and Silver Medal, AFERM Risk Manager of the Year Award, Federal 100 Award, and the Arthur S. Flemming Award. She received her BA in Environmental Studies at Sonoma State University and Ph.D. in public policy at The George Washington University.
Job Titles:
- Director, Training & Outreach
Job Titles:
- Chief Executive Officer of the Data Coalition
Nick Hart is the Chief Executive Officer of the Data Coalition. He helped to craft the milestone Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, including the OPEN Government Data Act, and has worked with numerous federal agencies and congressional committees to design effective data, evaluation, and privacy policies over the past decade. Prior to joining the Data Coalition, he was Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Evidence Project. He also served at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as a senior analyst and special assistant, writing executive branch budget proposals and encouraging increased capacity for evidence-based practices across government. He is an adjunct professor of program evaluation at George Washington University. He earned a doctorate from George Washington University's Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, specializing in program evaluation.
Ophir Frieder focuses on scalable information processing systems with particular emphasis on health informatics. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, AIMBE, IEEE, and NAI, an Inaugural Member of the ACM SIGIR Academy, and a Member of Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was awarded the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Research in Information Science Award for medical informatics and the IEEE Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award for scalable information systems. Heavily involved with industrial efforts, he is the Lead Science and Technology Advisor for Aurora: The Business Forge and Chief Scientific Officer of Invaryant, Inc. He is a member of the computer science faculty at Georgetown University and the biostatistics, bioinformatics and biomathematics faculty in the Georgetown University Medical Center.
Paul Romer is an economist and policy entrepreneur and co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences. He has spent his career at the intersection of economics, innovation, technology, and urbanization, working to speed up human progress. His title is University Professor at NYU, with an affiliation in the School of Law. Before coming to NYU, Paul taught at Stanford, and while there, started Aplia, an education technology company he later sold to Thomson Learning. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Chicago.
Philip Resnik holds a joint appointment as Professor in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Department of Linguistics, and an Affiliate Professor appointment in Computer Science. He earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Science at Harvard in 1987, and his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania in 1993, and joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1996. His industry experience prior to entering academia includes time in R&D at Bolt Beranek and Newman, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Resnik's research focuses on computational modeling of language that brings together linguistic knowledge, domain expertise, and data-driven machine learning methods, with an emphasis on applications in computational social science as well as experience in multilingual text analysis and machine translation, and scientific interests in computational cognitive neuroscience. He holds two patents and has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and conference papers. At various times his work has been highlighted in Newsweek, The Economist, New Scientist, and on National Public Radio, and he has been a repeat organizer and panelist at SXSW Interactive. Outside academia, Resnik was a technical co-founder of CodeRyte (clinical natural language processing, acquired in 2012 by 3M Health Information Systems), and is an advisor to Converseon (social strategy and analytics), FiscalNote (machine learning and analytics for government relations), and SoloSegment (web site search and content optimization).
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder
- Director
- Distinguished Career Professor
Rayid Ghani is a Distinguished Career Professor in the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science and the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a co-founder of Edgeflip, an analytics startup that grew out of the Obama 2012 Campaign, focused on social media products for non-profits, advocacy groups, and charities. Ghani also started and runs the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship.
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder
- Secretary
- Chapin Hall Senior Research Fellow
Robert M. Goerge is a Chapin Hall senior research fellow with more than 35 years of experience in research focused on improving the available data and information on children and families. He is a member of the Committee on National Statistics. He is also co-chair and co-founder of the International Society for Child Indicators. Goerge received his M.A. and Ph.D. in social policy from The University of Chicago.
Sherry Glied is Dean of New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. From 1989-2013, she was Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. She was Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management from 1998-2009. On June 22, 2010, she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services, and served in that capacity from July 2010 through August 2012. She had previously served as Senior Economist for health care and labor market policy on the President's Council of Economic Advisers in 1992-1993, under Presidents Bush and Clinton, and participated in the Clinton Health Care Task Force. She has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and served as a member of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. Her principal areas of research are in health policy reform and mental health care policy. Her book on health care reform, Chronic Condition, was published by Harvard University Press in January 1998. Her book with Richard Frank, Better But Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the U.S. since 1950, was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006. She is co-editor, with Peter C. Smith, of The Oxford Handbook of Health Economics, which was published by the Oxford University Press in 2011. She holds a B.A. in economics from Yale University, an M.A. in economics from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
Suzette Kent is an American government official who served as Federal Chief Information Officer of the United States from January 29, 2018 until July 2020. She was the fourth person to formally hold the job of Federal CIO, which was created by the E-Government Act of 2002. The Federal CIO's office is a part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Kent earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Louisiana State University. Prior to her appointment as Federal CIO, she was a principal of the banking and capital markets advisory team at the Ernst & Young Financial Services Office in Dallas.
Job Titles:
- Vice President at the American Idea Foundation
Ted McCann is Vice President at the American Idea Foundation. He was previously Assistant to the Speaker of the US House of Representatives for Policy, managing welfare, education, workforce, pension, telecom, and Social Security issues for Speaker Paul Ryan. During his tenure he shepherded numerous pieces of legislation through the Congress, including the passage of the First Step Act, the Foundations for Evidence Based Policy Act, Family First Prevention Services Act, and the Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act. Additionally, he was the lead staffer in developing Speaker Ryan's Better Way agenda on Poverty, Opportunity and Upward Mobility. Previously, he was the Staff Director for the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee under Speaker Ryan's chairmanship. In that capacity he negotiated and drafted the Social Security Benefit Protection and Opportunity Enhancement Act of 2015 as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act, which included the largest improvement to Social Security's finances since the 1983 reforms. Prior to his tenure at Ways and Means, Ted worked as a Budget Analyst for the Republican staff of the House Budget Committee. He developed Speaker Ryan's recent project on Expanding Opportunity in America and was instrumental in the development of the Roadmap for America's Future in 2010 and Speaker Ryan's poverty agenda over the past decade. He studied at the Naval War College and earned his B.A. in Foreign Affairs and Economics from Miami University.