Kirk is a project director with the Rhode Island Education Research Initiatives team at the Annenberg Institute, where he supports projects aimed at enhancing education quality and equity statewide. 

Drawing from his own background as a public school student in Houston and a college advisor in San Antonio, Kirk is deeply committed to advancing high-quality public education for all students. Prior to joining Annenberg, Kirk completed an M.P.P. in Education Policy from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. He also holds a B.A. in Economics from Trinity University.  Beyond his professional endeavors, Kirk plays rugby, watches weekend matinee movies, and avoids brisket cooked north of Texas.

Kevin Escudero is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Sociology Department at Brown University. His research and teaching interests center on the comparative study of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity; immigration and citizenship; social movements; higher education; and law. His book, Organizing While Undocumented (NYU Press, 2020), examined Latinx and Asian undocumented immigrant youth's use of an intersectional movement identity to affirm a heterogeneous movement identity and build coalitions with members of similarly situated groups. With the support of an NSF CAREER Award, he established the Immigrant Student Research Project (ISRP) Lab. As part of the lab's activities, he is preparing to launch a national survey of immigrant graduate and professional degree students—documented, undocumented, and DACAmented—to understand their experiences in higher education and upon entry into the US workforce. 

Kevin's work is aligned with that of the field of education and the Annenberg Institute in that it examines the role of educational institutions in both providing barriers to and serving as a mechanism for achieving social mobility among members of minoritized populations, particularly immigrant community members in the US today. Relatedly, in undertaking this work he frequently employs the use of a community engaged research approach to support the development of relevant policy recommendations to promote equity in US higher education and beyond.  

Kenneth Wong is the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair for Education Policy at Brown. He has conducted extensive research in the politics of education, federalism, policy innovation, outcome-based accountability, and governance redesign (including city and state takeover, management reform, and Title I school-wide reform). His research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, the Social Science Research Council, the Spencer Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the British Council, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has advised the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Secretaries of Education and Interior, state legislature, governors, mayors, and the leadership in several large urban school systems on how to redesign the accountability framework. 

Kea is a Research Project Manager supporting the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL) team at the Annenberg Institute. She is excited to continue building her education research knowledge at Annenberg. 

Prior to joining the RPPL team, Kea worked as an analyst at the Equity Institute in Providence where she completed her graduate internship. Her primary work at the Equity Institute was in collaboration with the TA2BA program to evaluate existing support for paraprofessionals entering the teacher workforce. She concurrently worked as a research assistant under Professor Kenneth Wong in evaluating K-12 schools within the Department of Defense Education Agency (DoDEA). Prior to her work in education policy and research, Kea was a Teach For America Rhode Island Corps Member where she taught 7th grade math for two years. She is passionate about culturally responsive math curriculum and alleviating the barriers to math education.

Based on her prior experiences, Kea’s other research interests include teacher absenteeism, rural education opportunities, and college access.  

Kea holds a B.A. in Economics from Baylor University and A.M. in Urban Education Policy from Brown University. In her free time, Kea enjoys exploring beaches and restaurants around Rhode Island, knitting, and updating her Letterbox.

Katie Rieser is Director of the Master of Arts in Teaching program and a Senior Lecturer in Education. Before coming to Brown, she was a lecturer in English Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She spent the first decade of her career as a middle and high school teacher and dean of curriculum in Cambridge, MA. Her research connects teacher education pedagogy with anti-racist best practices in K-12 schools.

As the Managing Director, Katie Doyle stewards Annenberg’s inclusive culture and actionable strategy toward a vision of educational equity. Education was a priority in her family, and Katie began her career after earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame. In her early career, she worked with families caught in the foster care and carceral systems and served as a family therapist before moving into leadership and executive positions in the nonprofit sector where she wanted to have a broader impact on the policies and systems that impact the community. With Master of Social Work and Master of Business Administration degrees from the University of Michigan, she eventually moved further upstream to the University of Michigan Master of Social Work Program to teach and prepare graduates to use a lens of social justice, inclusion and belonging to lead and transform teams, organizations and systems. The majority of her career has been focused on people facing complex trauma, so Katie was drawn to Annenberg’s vision to connect people and evidence to transform educational policies and practices that value and celebrate students and their families. She is grateful to be a part of Annenberg’s unique approach to community engaged scholarship and its commitment to the Rhode Island community. She loves introducing family and friends from all over to charming Rhode Island.

Kathleen Lynch is Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences at The Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. She was Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. Her research program examines education policies to strengthen outcomes for academically vulnerable children, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). She has published on topics including teacher professional development and curriculum reform, teacher evaluation, personalized learning, and out-of-school time in STEM. Her scholarship has been published in journals such as Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, AERA Open, Mathematical Thinking and Learning, Teachers College Record, and Journal of Mathematical Behavior. Her research has been supported by the American Educational Research Association, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. 

Lynch holds a doctorate in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she was a Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She also holds an Ed.M. in education policy and management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in History and Literature with high honors from Harvard College. Prior to graduate school, she was a K-12 teacher.

Katherine A. Mason is a medical anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in China and the U.S. Her research addresses issues in medical anthropology, population health, bioethics, China studies, reproductive health, mental health, and global health. Her first book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic, based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China on the transformation of public health in China following the 2003 SARS epidemic, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. Infectious Change won the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize from the British Sociological Association in 2019. Her scholarly work has appeared in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, The China Journal, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and the Journal of Infectious Diseases, among many other venues.

Mason is co-founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), a multidisciplinary effort to build an archive of diverse populations' experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic in the form of text, voice and image-based journals. PJP has collected nearly 27,000 journal entries and accompanying survey data from more than 1,800 people in more than 50 countries since May 2020. The Project has received national and international media attention from multiple news outlets including the New York Times and NPR. Mason is PI, with Co-PIs Andrea Flores (Brown Education) and Sarah Willen (UConn Anthropology), of an NSF-funded study of first-generation college students and their parents during Covid-19 that uses the PJP platform to follow families over a period of two years. She is also working with Flores, Willen, and Brown post-doctoral fellow Heather Wurtz (PSTC) on a Peterson Foundation-funded study of immigrant women to New York City during Covid-19, also using the PJP platform. Addtionally, Mason is PI of an NSF-funded project in collaboration with Yifeng Cai (Brown PhD '23), which draws upon interviews and social media to track the Covid-19 experiences of Shanghai residents from the beginning of the pandemic through the present.

In addition to her work on Covid-19, Mason is currently working on a book project on perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs), based on several years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork that she conducted in the U.S. and China between 2015 and 2021. As part of this project, she became a certified postpartum doula (DONA International, 2018) and earned a certificate in maternal mental health (Postpartum Support International and 2020 Mom, 2017).

Mason currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology. She also is affiliated with Brown's Population Studies and Training Center, and the Program in Science and Technology Studies, and was a Faculty Fellow at the Swearer Center from 2018-21. She has previously served as Director of Undergraduate Research and Director of Undergraduate Community Engagement. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Peterson Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, U.S. Fulbright program, and Association for Asian Studies. She has previously held positions as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar (2013-2015) and a Lecturer in the Health and Societies program at the University of Pennsylvania (2011-2013). She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2011.

Katharine Meyer is a Fellow at the Brookings Institute, a former Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, and a Research Affiliate with the Nudge4Solutions Lab at the University of Virginia. Her primary line of research focuses on the application of behavioral science insights to develop and evaluate interventions helping students and families navigate complex education investment decisions. Her current experimental work includes projects targeting preschool attendance, library engagement, financial aid filing, and college persistence. Her non-experimental work includes projects on the effects of school counselors on student outcomes and the returns to community college enrollment. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Daedalus, and the Journal of Student Financial Aid. Meyer holds a PhD in Education Policy and MPP from the University of Virginia.

Kate Larned is a Research Scientist at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, where she conducts research on teacher professional learning. As a part of The Research Partnership for Professional Learning, her research aims to advance educational equity and improve student classroom experiences, well-being, and academic growth by better understanding how to support teacher learning and development. Prior to joining Annenberg, she earned her Ph.D. in Education Policy and Program Evaluation at Harvard University, where she was an IES Partnering in Education Research Fellow, and worked as a quantitative research analyst at the Center for Education Policy Research. She began her career as a high school math teacher in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She holds an A.M. in Urban Education Policy from Brown University and a B.A. in economics from Macalester College.