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You can use this page to email Anna-Carolina Haensch, Ben Feder, Julia Lane, Angela Tombari, Frauke Kreuter about Data Literacy and Evidence Building.
About the Book
Data is transforming economic activity everywhere—from targeted advertising and advanced service delivery to the rise of $900,000 AI jobs. However, this transformation hasn't reached much of government and public policy, nor have other entities been tasked with steering organizations. This textbook aims to change that by teaching government decision-makers, policy students, and all others interested in policy and evidence-based steering how to use public data to create evidence that serves people more effectively. It is based on training classes designed for federal, state, and local government agency staff, where they learn data science skills through real-world projects. Over the past six years, over 1,000 staff members from over 450 agencies have been trained using this approach, leading to successful products like the Multi-State Postsecondary Report, the TANF Data Collaborative, the Arkansas Dashboards, and the Unemployment to Reemployment Portal. The approach has also resulted in published scientific papers.
About the Author
Anna-Carolina ("Caro") Haensch is currently an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maryland, teaching statistics and methodology in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) and a Researcher ("Akademische Rätin") at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). Her research interests include survey methodology, synthetic data, and the societal impact of large language models. She is passionate about teaching data science and statistics to diverse audiences and welcomes collaboration opportunities.
Benjamin Feder is a Senior Manager of Training and Analytics at the Coleridge Initiative, a non-profit organization whose goal is to use data to transform the way government access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects, and a secure data facility. At the Coleridge Initiative, Benjamin has participated in the instruction of 25 Applied Data Analytics training programs in a variety of roles, currently as a lead lecturer, curriculum developer, and project team lead. Along with his training work, in his current role, Benjamin collaborates with data providers and data stewards to help build new infrastructure and data models spanning across government agency and state silos.
Julia Lane is is a Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a NYU Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytics. She cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects and a secure data facility She currently serves on the Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building and the National AI Research Resources Task Force.
Angela Tombari is a the Director of Research Partnerships & Chief Methodologist at the Kentucky Center for Statistics.
Frauke Kreuter is is the Professor of Statistics and Data Science in Social Sciences and the Humanities at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany; Co-director of the Social Data Science Center (SoDa), and faculty member in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) at the University of Maryland, USA; and until recently head of the statistical methods group at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg, Germany. In addition to her academic work, Frauke Kreuter is Co-Founder of the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to accelerate data-driven research and policy around human beings and their interactions for program management,and Co-Founder of the German language podcast Dig Deep.