Her research is in applied microeconomics with a focus on labor economics, education economics, and health economics. Her research addresses topics such as school choice, teacher labor markets, and student non-cognitive skills. She has received funding from National Science Foundation, American Society of Hispanic Economists, National Economics Association, and Southern Economics Association. Prior to receiving her PhD. from Georgia State, she was a Teach For America Corp member and taught 7th grade Special Education Mathematics in Hawaii.

Carrie Conaway is a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Until June 2019, she was the chief strategy and research officer for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and led the agency’s Office of Planning and Research. She served as DESE’s principal investigator on numerous evaluations of state education programs and has published three peer-reviewed articles on connecting research to practice. Her team also managed the agency’s strategic planning process and built tools that help districts benchmark their performance and deploy their resources more effectively. She led the development of DESE’s top-scoring, $250 million Race to the Top proposal and managed its implementation, as well as winning several other grants to support state research, evaluation, and data use initiatives. Previously she was the deputy director of the New England Public Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and an associate editor of the Bank’s flagship publication, Regional Review. She also served as the president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy in 2018-19. She has nearly 20 years of experience in integrating research and practice to improve public policy. She holds a B.A. in sociology from Oberlin College; an M.A. in policy analysis and labor policy from the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota; and a M.A. in sociology and social policy from Harvard University.

Carolyn studies teacher professional learning on the RPPL team.

Prior to joining Annenberg, she was an English Language Arts teacher, Instructional Coach and Intervention Support Coordinator. Her current work is motivated by her experiences participating in and facilitating professional learning.  

She holds an M.A. in Urban Education Policy from Brown University, an M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction from Boston College, and a B.A. in English and Theater from University of New Hampshire.

Carly Robinson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. Her research interests sit at the intersection of education, psychology, and policy. In particular, she draws on insights from social psychology and behavioral science to design and experimentally test interventions that improve social support for students. Some of her recent work focuses on strengthening teacher-student relationships and mobilizing effective family engagement. As a complement to her applied research, her methodological work emphasizes open science practices, such as preregistering hypothesis-testing studies. Prior to conducting educational research, Carly worked as a New York City teacher. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University, a Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and B.A. in Psychology from Williams College.

Cameron Arnzen political scientist studying the relationship between schools and democracy and former Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. Arnzen’s studies the politics of K-12 education focusing broadly on the link between education and democracy. Drawing primarily from political science theories and frameworks, his scholarship explores how schools shape citizens—and subsequently how citizens shape schools. His specific research topics include the public’s role in education governance, American’s attitudes toward education, and the role of schools in fostering political participation. 

Growing up in rural Idaho, Arnzen is also interested in the unique relationship between rural communities and their schools in terms of both education policy and democratic engagement. His interest lies in deepening our understanding of how federal and state education policies clash with local, rural realities. 

Arnzen holds a Ph.D. is in Politics & Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. He received an M.A. in Political Science from Duke University and a B.A. in Political Economy from The College of Idaho. He has also regularly taught a variety of courses on American politics, education policy, federalism, and public policy at the graduate and undergraduate levels. 

Dr. C. Malik Boykin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences (CLPS) at Brown University. Malik received his doctorate in Social and Personality Psychology from UC Berkeley, his M.A. in Social-Organizational Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, and his B.S. in Psychology from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) – after first attending Howard University. He was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow for two years at Brown in the Department of CLPS before his current faculty appointment. His research focuses on intergroup relations, hierarchy, prejudice, mentorship, and racial identity. Several of these themes inform his research on attitudes toward HBCUs and bias in decision-making algorithms. He has affiliate appointments with both the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) and the Data Science Initiative (DSI). He has previously secured funding from the Ford Fellowship Foundation, the Greater Good Science Center, and the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology to conduct his research. Dr. Boykin is a member of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), and the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc.

Bryce Millett Steinberg received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2015, and a bachelor's degree from Brown University in 2009. Her work focuses on health and education in the developing world, particularly the effect of market forces and government programs on families’ decisions to invest in human capital.

Steinberg's research focuses on households' decisions to invest in education in the developing world and how market forces and government programs can affect these decisions.  Her dissertation work shows that while increased wages can be good for investment in very young children in rural India, for older children, higher wages can lead families to substitute out of human capital investment and into productive work. Positive rainfall shocks were associated with lower test scores and enrollment rates for these children, even though family incomes increased. In addition, she shows that government workfare programs that increase labor demand can have a similar effect: in rural India, a large workfare program increases dropout rates for adolescents.  These results suggest that opportunity cost of schooling matters greatly for households' decisions to invest in human capital.

Brendon is a Research Project Director at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, where he assists the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL). Prior to joining Annenberg, Brendon worked as a research assistant for Dr. Stephen Raudenbush, at the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab, and at the World Bank's Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) group primarily focusing on program evaluation for education-related projects. In addition to his research experience, Brendon is a 2018 Teach For America corps member, where he worked as an 8th-grade English teacher and community organizer in Houston, TX. Specifically, Brendon supported community organizing initiatives that advocated for improved school services for immigrant students and families and created an educator resource guide that school staff could use to better support this subpopulation. As a first-generation college graduate, Brendon knows the powerful role that education has in shaping an individual's personal and professional trajectory and has committed himself to creating more equitable and efficient education systems so all students have the possibility to reach their fullest potential. 

Brendon holds a B.A. in Business Administration, a B.A. in Public Health from the University of Washington, and a Master in Public Policy from the University of Chicago.

Brenda Santos leads the Annenberg Institute’s research-practice partnerships with Rhode Island school districts. Before coming to Brown, Brenda was Vice President of Teaching and Learning at Achievement First. She began her work in education as a high school social studies teacher in the Bronx, NY, and later was a teacher and assistant principal in New Haven, CT. Most recently, Brenda facilitated multi-generational community research teams that developed community-derived equity indicators in Providence and Newport, RI. Brenda has also taught history at the undergraduate level and served as a clinical supervisor for pre-service teachers. 

Brenda's research has focused on the instructional practices of culturally responsive and sustaining teachers in the high school disciplines and on practitioner inquiry models of professional teacher learning. Brenda holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Rhode Island, master’s degrees in History from Yale University and in Social Studies Education from New York University, and a bachelor’s degree in Social Thought and Political Economy from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Bobby is the Jonathan M Nelson Assistant Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship at Brown University. Prior to joining Brown, he completed a PhD in economics from Stanford University in 2017.