After a varied educational career that included an Arabic Studies degree at Notre Dame, an internship in Delhi, volunteer stints in Geneva, Egypt, and South Sudan, and a year as a graduate research assistant at the UChicago Crime Lab, now housed at Harris, Meyer graduated when Mathematica was about to launch its international unit into a standalone division within the company. Laura Meyer, MPP’15, is playing that game right now. “And you can be in two, or three, or even four different types of projects at once-but you also have to be careful not to stretch yourself so far and try to touch so many things that you collapse.” “You get put onto a red square or a green circle, and then you are given the opportunity to stretch over to the yellow triangle,” he says. Some Mathematica employees remain on one topic for years more light-footed workers straddle multiple areas simultaneously, a dance Stagner likens to a game of Twister. “It’s aligned with my vision.”Īt Mathematica, where the workload is driven by the government’s agenda, Yu focuses on employment of older workers, individuals with disabilities, and other vulnerable groups, and covers a broad area of topics in public finance and labor economics. “A lot of things I learned from Harris are still the core to the work that I do – like the statistics econometrics, programming valuation, and cost-benefit analysis,” says Wu. These values dovetail perfectly with the skills of dedicated researchers like Wu, who flourished under Harris’ emphasis on quantitative studies. Whether addressing the effects of climate change, disability policies, or the efficacy of birth control education, the goal is to improve programs, refine strategies, and, above all, deepen understanding of the world around us. Mathematica’s vision and reliability has served it well in partnerships with federal government agencies, state and local government agencies, foundations, international aid organizations, and commercial health organizations. ![]() “We are trying to use the data we have, the technology and the methodology we have, to try to understand how to implement government programs-and understand how this program touches people's lives.” “It’s a place for big ideas, and Harris taught us the same thing Mathematica does: Always try to make a difference,” Wu says. “Harris is dedicated to the quantitative and the rigorous, but it's also built around the edges much more about leadership and use of evidence and ways to manage-as opposed to just test and evaluate,” Stagner said.Īpril Yanyuan Wu, PhD’10, a senior researcher at Mathematica employee since 2014, says the company has long had a great reputation among Harris students. This makes Mathematica a natural extension for those who have absorbed Harris’ core mission and educational approach. The employee-owned company boasts a team of 1,600-plus data and social science experts in eight locations from Seattle to Cambridge, Massachusetts, each of them aiming, through quantitative work with a direct social impact, to add knowledge and understanding to what these government programs accomplish-and how they might accomplish it better. Twenty years later, Stagner was heading up Mathematica’s Chicago office, absorbed in data and social science to produce rigorous, evidence-based solutions for government agencies-and continuing to ponder the implications of his revelation.Ī Princeton, New Jersey–based company that uses data, analytics, and technology to address pressing social challenges, Mathematica has long served as an ideal landing place for Harris graduates. The organization that conducted that sexual abstinence evaluation was Mathematica Policy Research. “It was like that old joke,” says Stagner: “They used evidence the way a drunk uses a light post: for support rather than illumination.” He began to wonder what the purpose of producing rigorous evidence was in a world where people were already dug in on their version of the truth. When he told people what he was working on, after receiving a barrage of predictably emotional responses, he had a revelation: Most everyone he came into contact with was eager to accept the evaluation if it upheld their beliefs-and reject it if it didn’t. Not long after getting his PhD at Harris in 1992, Matthew Stagner served as a federal project officer for the national sexual abstinence evaluation for the U.S.
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