STUDY OF TEACHER PREPARATION PROGRAMS

STAFF BIOS

Stuart Elliott is Study Co-Director for the Study Teacher Preparation Programs in the United States. He is the Director of the Board on Testing and Assessment in the Center for Education at the National Research Council (NRC) He is Assessment and Vice President and Director at SLS Consulting. Formerly, he served as Senior Associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers and as Senior Analyst at Project Performance Corporation. He also spent several years as a research fellow in economics at Carnegie Mellon and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Elliott has a PhD in economics from MIT with specializations in labor economics and behavioral economics.

Lisa Towne is Study Co-Director for the Study Teacher Preparation Programs in the United States. She is Senior Program Officer in the Center for Education at the National Research Council (NRC). She was an adjunct instructor of statistics at the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies. Her work at the NRC has focused on the nature of education research and its implications for evidence-based education policy. Ms. Towne was co-editor of a series of the National Academies Press (NAP) publications, including Scientific Research in Education and Advancing Scientific Research in Education. Prior to joining the NRC, Ms. Towne was the Assistant Director for Social and Behavioral Sciences in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a Presidential Management Fellow and social science analyst in the US Department of Education's Planning and Evaluation Service. Also a former staff member at Caliber Associates, she conducted evaluation work for such federal agencies as the Head Start Bureau, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Department of Defense Education Activity. Ms. Towne has also been an adjunct instructor of quantitative methods at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, where she received the Outstanding Faculty Member award in 2001. She has a MPP from Georgetown University and a BS in Mathematics from the University of Vermont.

Tina Winters is a Research Associate in the Center for Education at the National Research Council (NRC). Over the past 10 years, she has worked on a wide variety of education studies and activities at the NRC in such areas and K-12 science, middle school mathematics, assessment, and education research and policy. She also recently worked on a DBASSE-wide strategic planning effort on the quality and utility of behavioral and social science research for social policy formulation. She has provided editorial or research assistance for a number of NRC publications, including the National Science Education Standards and companion publications, Mathematics Education in the Middle Grades, Knowing What Students Know, Scientific Research in Education, and Strengthening Peer Review in Federal Agencies that Support Education Research. Ms. Winters was also a co-editor of the report Advancing Scientific Research in Education.

Patricia Santos is a Senior Program Assistant in the NRC’s Center for Education. Ms. Santos worked with the NRC’s Policy and Global Affairs Division on the Changing Biomedical Needs Study, NIH Minority Training Program Study, and with the Board on Science, Technology, and Law. Prior to joining the NRC, she taught middle school mathematics for 13 years. She was awarded the Maryland Governor’s Academy Citation for Excellence in Teaching and was active in creating and evaluating interdisciplinary assessment tools. She taught mathematics at the Pan American School in Salvador, Brazil, for 4 years. She received both a B.A. in Sociology and an M.Ed. from the University of Maryland.