Who We Are
Leadership
Jessica Logan
is an Associate Professor of Special Education at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. Dr. Logan’s research seeks to improve the research practices of researchers in the field of children’s learning and development, with specific focus on how statistical models and research designs can be used to answer complex questions about how children learn. Through applications of new methodologies such as Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials, planned missing data designs, and Quantile Regression analysis, her work simultaneously advances the fields of research methods and child development through purposeful collaboration. Dr. Logan’s is also focused on improving the research data management and data sharing practices of researchers in the learning and developmental sciences, thus encouraging transparency in science and improving statistical conclusion validity. Website: Jarlogan.com Twitter: @jarlogan
Sara A. Hart
is the Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Developmental Science and Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Broadly, her substantive research relates to understanding how and why people differ in their cognitive development, particularly focused on reading and math development. Most of her work to date has focused on using twin and genomic methods to understand the “nature” and “nurture” of child development. She examines the role of an individual’s genetic variants and contexts in predicting school achievement and intervention response. She also contributes to the field of meta-science, understanding how scientists do science, with a particular interest in supporting rigorous and reproducible educational and developmental science. With colleagues, she built a data repository, LDbase, to support the data sharing and data access needs of scientists working in fields of developmental science related to education.
Crystal Lewis
is a freelance data management consultant (cghlewis.com). Her experience spans the research life cycle including collecting, curating, sharing, and analyzing data, particularly for studies funded by federal grants. She enjoys working at the intersection of education research and data management planning, helping researchers build and implement organized processes that lead to more secure, reliable, and usable data. She is also a co-organizer for two community groups—R-Ladies St. Louis, an organization focused on promoting gender diversity in the R community, as well as the POWER (Providing Opportunities for Women in Education Research) Data Management Hub, where she facilitates peer data management support in the education research community.
Dr. Christopher Schatschneider
is a professor in the department of Psychology at Florida State University, and is an Associate Director of the Florida Center for Reading Research. Dr. Schatschneider has been conducting research on early reading development and reading disabilities for over 30 years. He is also trained as a methodologist, and frequently provides consultation to investigators around design and analysis issues that arise when designing intervention studies and analyzing data from studies of early reading development. Dr. Schatschneider has considerable experience in directing data activities in large multi-site studies of populations, especially studies involving the collection of student and classroom level data. Additionally, Dr. Schatschneider has directed the data analyses for federally funded studies of (1) large multi-site early reading intervention studies (2) twin studies employing a behavioral genetic design and (3) large scale test development studies.
Willa van Dijk
is an Assistant Professor of Special Education at Utah State University. Her research focuses on preventing reading failure, with an emphasis on reading development, interventions, and teacher education. Open science stands at the core of her research. She advocates for the importance of open science in educational sciences and tries to set an example by using open science practices in her work. Additionally, she researches the adoption and use of open science practices within the education sciences.
Dr. Jeffrey Shero
is a postdoctoral scholar at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and focuses on the study of individual differences in cognitive development and health outcomes. Within this space, Jeffrey’s work lies heavily in the areas of research methodologies and metascience, focusing on novel approaches to enhance the types of research that can be conducted and the scientific questions that can be answered. Beyond this, Jeffrey has a passion for open science and has worked heavily in this space, specializing in the areas of data deidentification, navigating IRB’s, and implications of open science practices through his work with the open data repository LDbase.org.
Tara Reynolds
is a Data Manager for the Florida Center for Reading Research with over 20 years of experience managing research data for more than 18 federally funded research grants. She finds joy in transforming the beautiful aims of PI’s research into something boring, electronic, flat and full of 1’s and 0’s, lol. She manages multiple, multi-year, multi-site databases of literacy research, and is an expert in the creation of databases, data entry systems, data documentation, and implementation of data quality checks through the use of RedCap. Tara is also on the team that is creating the educational and developmental sciences data repository, LDbase.