Navigating the Data Deluge: A Panel on Social Data and Research Methodology

Tarek Azzam

• Dr. Tarek Azzam is a Professor in the Department of Education. Dr. Azzam’s research focuses on developing new methods suited for real-world evaluations. These methods attempt to address some of the logistical, political, and technical challenges that evaluators commonly face in practice. His work aims to improve the rigor and credibility of evaluations and increase its potential impact on programs and policies. His research work involves studying the impact of politics on the evaluation process and the integration of new technologies and resources, such as crowdsourcing, to develop new evaluation-specific methodologies.

Maira Covre

• Dr. Maira Covre is professor of methodology and gender studies at the Social Sciences Institute of Rio de Janeiro State University (ICS/UERJ), Brazil. Head of the Centre for Studies on Contemporary Inequalities and Gender Relations (NUDERG). Her research addresses long-term trends in family formation and union dissolution, inequalities in gender relations, as well as the violence suffered by women in different contexts, particularly Brazil and Latin America.

Andy De Barros

• Dr. Andreas de Barros is an Assistant Professor at UCI’s School of Education and, by courtesy, the Department of Economics. Andy’s research specializes in program evaluation and evidence-based education policy in less-developed countries. Before joining the University of California, Irvine, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT’s Department of Economics, where he worked with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

Jessica Santana

• Dr. Jessica Santana is an Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she studies the role of networks in innovation and entrepreneurship. Her recent researchexplored how entrepreneurs use peers and rhetoric to navigate sensemaking and stigma following startup failure. She also investigates the relationship between innovation and ethics in contexts such as synthetic biology and cryptocurrency crowdfunding. Her work is driven by insights from organizational theory, economic sociology, socialpsychology, and network science. She relies on a variety of methodological approaches, including experimental, statistical, and computational analyses. Her research is informed by her prior experience working in the types of organizations she studies, from Silicon Valley startups to Nicaraguan farming cooperatives. Jessica holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University and a Master of Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley’s School of Information, with certification in the Management of Technology from the Haas School of Business.

Zach Pardos

• Dr. Zach Pardos is an Associate Professor of Education at UC Berkeley studying adaptive learning and AI. His current research focuses on knowledge representation and recommender systems approaches to increasing upward mobility in postsecondary education using behavioral and semantic data. He earned his PhD in Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a dissertation on computational models of cognitive mastery. Funded by a National Science Foundation Fellowship (GK-12), he spent extensive time with K-12 educators and students working to integrate educational technology into the curriculum as a formative assessment tool. After completing his PhD in 2012, he spent one year as a Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At Cal, he directs the Computational Approaches to Human Learning research lab, teaches in the datascience undergraduate program, and is an affiliated faculty in Cognitive Science.

Discussant:

Travis Candieas

• Travis Candieas is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara Gevirtz Graduate School of Education. Candieas's research focuses on education policy and institutional quality with an emphasis in quantitative methods in the social sciences. His current projects include evaluating education and workforce development programs, longitudinal outcomes of intervention programs, and student sense of belonging internationally across institutions of higher education. His academic work has been presented at the American Evaluation Association annual conference, and his technical reports have been used for regional planning and implementation of California public policy initiatives.