As a Research Scientist at Brandeis University, I lead a large data synthesis project designed to estimate small ethnically and religiously defined groups in the United States, with a particular focus on study of the Jewish population. I have experience with national surveys in health, education and social behavior, international sources of data on population dynamics, and the evaluation of community-based programs for at risk populations.
Teaching experience includes courses in Research Methods and Multivariate Data Analysis at the Heller Graduate School for Social Policy and Management, Graduate Seminar in Experimental Design & Statistics at Brown University Dept. of Psychology, and Research Methods in Social Psychology at Wellesley College Dept. of Psychology.
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Lead a team of researchers in data synthesis projects. This includes continued expansion of our project to estimate the prevalence and demographic profiles of the US Jewish population and other…
Provide expert review of proposed research protocols to ensure that the rights of human subjects are protected and the risk of harms are minimized.
Developed a data synthesis project to provide national profiles of the Jewish population in the United States. Results serve as a model for estimation of rare groups.
Directed technical assistance to community programs in the use of local and national sources of data to evaluate the effectiveness of their substance abuse reduction programs as part of the…
Developed data driven logic models for the evaluation of community-based substance abuse reduction programs in collaboration with teams of researchers at Brandeis and CUNY Grad Center as part of the…
Courses: Graduate seminar in Experimental Design (Statistics) & Social Cognition
Conducted evaluation research of an after school program for at-risk youth.
Developed a program of research to study the role of emotion and cognition in attitude formation and change. Results led to grant-funding from the National Science Foundation.
My early interests and training were in social and cognitive psychology. My work focused on theories of emotion, cognition and motivation to understand individual creativity and processes of attitude formation and change. This work evolved into applied work conducting evaluations of community-based substance abuse reduction programs and working with local communities to identify and analyze local sources of data. My current work focuses on the methodological challenges associated with studying small ethnically and religiously defined groups in the United States, with a particular focus on study of the Jewish population.
The primary goal in all of my work, whether it be basic research on human behavior or attitudes or evaluations of large complex social programs, is to break down the underlying logic of the problem to its most directly observable and measurable elements in a way that will maximize the internal and external validity of the research while minimizing potential threats to validity, and to employ the latest statistical methods to analyze the data.
