Laura is a Senior Data Analyst at the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University. In this role, she conducts data wrangling and analysis.
Laura has a decade of experience conducting research and evaluations in collaboration with state and federal agencies; she has training and experience with causal inference and demographic methods. Her particular methodological area of expertise, and passion, is working with state and federal agencies to make sense of messy administrative data. Her research on early care and education policy, K-12 education policy, immigration policy, and the social safety net has been published in academic journals and was cited in the February 2016 and March 2023 Economic Reports of the President. Laura previously worked at the RAND Corporation, the Study of Early Education through Partnerships (SEE-P) at the University of Virginia, and the Child and Family Research Partnership (CFRP) at The University of Texas at Austin.
Laura holds a Ph.D. in public policy from Duke University. She also holds a Master of Public Affairs from Indiana University – Bloomington and a B.A. in history and English from Rice University. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her partner, where they spend their time attending history lectures, rooting for the UVA women’s basketball team, and enjoying the Virginia wine region.
