Lauren Akers

I am a 2007 Davidson graduate with a passion for conducting rigorous, human-centered program evaluation and bridging research to practice. I lead program evaluation and assessment for the D.G. and Harriet Wall Martin Institute for Public Good, including a mixed-methods evaluation of the Institute’s federal FIPSE grant to create the Deliberative Citizenship Network (DCN), a national initiative that will span 100 campuses. In addition, I support assessment infrastructure for the Personal and Social Responsibility Inventory (PSRI), a campus climate survey purveyed by the Martin Institute. I also lecture in the college’s Educational Studies Department on research methods for educational programs as well as early childhood education.

Prior to joining the Martin Institute, I spent 16 years at Mathematica conducting research and mixed-methods program evaluations of early childhood policies and programs, particularly home visiting. I specialized in community-engaged formative evaluations, where I used human-centered design and participatory research methods to help early childhood organizations partner with community members to design and improve programs. In addition, I provided technical assistance to build early childhood organization’s internal research capacity. Notably, I served as co-principal investigator for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness (HomVEE) review, a high-stakes systematic review that identifies evidence-based early childhood home visiting models eligible for federal funding through the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program: homvee.acf.gov.  I have long served as a reviewer for the Early Childhood Research Quarterly. In addition to a religion degree from Davidson, I hold a Master of Public Policy from Duke University.

I married a fellow Davidson grad (Trey Akers, ’06) who works for the Town of Davidson’s planning department. You can find us biking around town with our two kids, Avery and Cade.