Christopher Rhoads

Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Institute of Education Sciences
Northwestern University
PhD, Statistics, Northwestern University, 2008
c-rhoads@northwestern.edu
curriculum vitae

Chris Rhoads is an Institute of Education Sciences postdoctoral fellow in policy research under the mentorship of IPR Faculty Fellow Larry Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Social Policy. His research interests are mainly focused on developing statistical methodologies that encourage optimal experimental design, as well as methodologies for causal inference from observational surveys. The hope is that advancements in such methods, combined with data collected from well designed experiments and surveys, will help to better inform public policy decision making.  His dissertation research focused on the development of a method for incorporating prior information about clustering effects into the analysis of cluster randomized experiments.  This research is applicable to many experiments in the field of education.

Rhoads’ current work includes: exploring the implications of “contamination” of experimental interventions for experimental design in clustered experiments; examining the implications of heterogeneous treatment effects for the planning of clustered experiments; attempting to develop better methods for dealing with missing data in experiments; developing procedures for evaluating measures of “implementation fidelity” in experimental interventions and looking at ways to integrate measures of implementation fidelity into analyses of experiments.

Rhoads received a BA in philosophy from Haverford College, a BS in applied mathematics from Stony Brook University, and a PhD in statistics from Northwestern University.