University of Notre Dame

I am an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child, where I lead and contribute to research on how education interventions are implemented, adapted, and sustained in real-world settings, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. My work sits at the intersection of implementation research, improvement-oriented inquiry, and applied evaluation, with a focus on understanding not only whether programs and policies work, but how they can work more reliably and equitably across diverse contexts. A central thread in my work is the challenge of moving from evidence-based interventions to consistent results in practice and at scale. Much of my recent research has focused on foundational learning, teacher and school leader support, and whole child development. For example, I am currently working on a hybrid impact-implementation evaluation of a foundational learning intervention in Senegal that examines why average program gains estimated through an RCT can mask substantial variation across implementation sites and across students with different performance levels. This work combines experimental methods, implementation measurement, and qualitative inquiry to understand how program delivery, contextual conditions, and local responses shape the activation of mechanisms needed for impact. More broadly, I am interested in the kinds of questions that implementation research is well positioned to address: why implementation varies, how systems respond to constraints, and what it takes for interventions to produce consistent results in practice and at scale. An important part of my work is teaching and mentoring around applied inquiry for learning and improvement. I recently taught a course, Policy Lab: Applied Qualitative Methods for Program Learning, which focused on how qualitative methods can be used not only for retrospective evaluation, but also for real-time learning, implementation feedback, and program improvement. The course emphasized designing qualitative inquiry that is decision-relevant, methodologically rigorous, and closely tied to the needs of practitioners and policy actors. Teaching this course has reinforced my interest in building stronger bridges between qualitative methods, implementation science, and improvement-focused work. My areas of expertise include implementation research, mixed methods, foundational literacy and numeracy, teacher professional development, school leadership, whole child development, practical measurement, and the study of variation across sites and systems. Although my home field is implementation research, many of the questions that animate my work—about variation across sites and sub-groups, learning from practice, and improving interventions in real-world settings—closely align with improvement science. I am eager to deepen that connection and to learn from scholars in the network.