Michael Baron
Michael Baron is a senior instructor for data analytics, data science, statistics, and business analytics courses at eCornell and Cornell University. His research interests include statistical methods, experimental design, and computational social science as they relate to leadership in disaster response, as well as equity, diversity, and inclusion policies. Baron holds a Doctor of Education in leadership and learning in organizations from Vanderbilt University Peabody College. He is the author of Increasing Student Engagement in Advanced Placement Classes in High School. This includes the implications of student engagement for enabling a diversity of perspectives in classrooms.
Sara Friedman
Sara Kuehlhorn Friedman is an adjunct lecturer in the MPPA program at Northwestern. Her research interests include the intersection of civic capacity and governance at the local, state, and federal levels. Before joining the MPPS faculty, she worked for the Center for Public Service at Portland State University as a researcher on various projects and she coordinated research for visiting Korean practitioner scholars from Seoul Metropolitan Government. Friedman currently provides project support for county-level equity assessment projects through the National Policy Consensus Center in Oregon. Friedman is past president of the Cascade Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration and remains active in the association. Friedman completed her PhD in Public Affairs and Policy at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University, where she explored immigration federalism and focused on issues relating to social equity, civil society, and global governance. Friedman holds a Master of Public Administration degree and a Master of Teaching English as a Second Language degree.
Erna Gevondyan
Erna Gevondyan is a Principal Energy Systems Risk Analyst in the Energy Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory—the first of 17 U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories tasked with tackling critical scientific challenges. Erna's research involves applying risk assessment techniques in support of efforts in fostering safety at nuclear power plants in developing nations, and other projects focused on the implementation of programs in support of safety at international nuclear facilities.
Additionally, Erna's work includes safety research projects in support of U.S. offshore energy. A great deal of this work involves processing large data sets to provide a technical basis to inform the key decision-makers. Erna is a graduate of Northwestern University (MPPA, 2019) and the Illinois Institute of Technology (B.S., Computer Science, 2015). As a transplant from the republic of Georgia—a former USSR republic, and a descendant of Armenian ancestry, Erna is fluent in the Russian, Georgian, and Armenian languages.
Mark Keightley
Mark Keightley is an economist with the nonpartisan Congressional Research Services (CRS) in Washington, DC. At CRS, he advises Congress and their staff on fiscal policy, business and international corporate taxation, and housing tax policy. Before joining CRS, Keightley was an associate with the Congressional Budget Office and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis. He has taught at Syracuse University, the College of William & Mary George Mason University, and George Washington University. Keightley’s research has been cited by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, U.S. Supreme Court, Government Accountability Office, Federal Reserve of Dallas, Brookings Institution, Cato Institute, Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, Center on Budget Policies and Priorities, Bloomberg, NY Times, CNN, Businessweek, Reuters, Tax Notes, Daily Tax Report, and various academic publications. Keightley earned an MS and PhD in economics from Florida State University.
Jerome Lassa
Jerry Lassa is a performance excellence professional with over 15 years experience in the health care sector, serving his first t 10 years in acute care at Northwestern Memorial Hospital (NMH) and the past five in ambulatory care at the Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services. The study and application of medical informatics decision support has been a core component of his professional practice. Early in his tenure at NMH, Lassa served on a National Library of Medicine-funded research team at that studied the information needs of clinicians in ambulatory care and implemented an electronic health record at various Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation practices. More recently as the director of performance excellence with the Alliance, he is leading the development of clinical performance measures reporting through a data warehouse for the electronic health record system that is being deployed across 10-plus community health centers that serve 100,000 under- and uninsured patients annually in Chicago. In addition, Lassa has supported numerous clinical pathway teams and deployed an operational and clinical benchmarking system for NMH that enabled benchmarking of resource and ancillary utilization. Lassa consults and speaks nationally on performance excellence in health care, as well as teaching statistics and performance excellence at SCS. He received his MS in applied mathematics with a statistics concentration from DePaul University and a BS in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois at Champaign.
Zachary H. Seeskin is a Senior Statistician with NORC at the University of Chicago, where he works on sample design, estimation, and data analysis for government and public interest surveys. Seeskin further contributes to imputation, adaptive design, total survey error analysis, and small area estimation for such surveys as the National Immunization Survey and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients. His expertise includes analyzing administrative data quality and combining data sources for evidence-building, topics on which he has published research in the Statistical Journal of the International Association of Official Statistics and the International Journal of Population Data Science. In addition, Seeskin and colleagues are developing automated statistical tools to assist researchers with evaluating quality of state and local administrative data sources. Seeskin holds a PhD in statistics from Northwestern University where he served as a U.S. Census Bureau Dissertation Fellow.
Andy Sharma is a political economist whose areas of specialty include aging, health disparities, later-life migration and quantitative methods. Currently he works with the Cedar Grove Institute on a project to employ statistical methodology to examine the adverse impact of economic and racial isolation on student performance in North Carolina. A research article from this investigation was published in Education Policy Analysis Archives (Volume 22, 2014) and this study was cited and listed under Table of Authorities in an Amicus Brief filed by the Society of American Law Teachers in the Fisher II case with the United States Supreme Court (October 2015). He has also published in other highly regarded journals, such as Ageing and Society, Applied Geography, Disability and Rehabilitation, Journal of Aging and Health, and Women’s Health Issues. Sharma is a former recipient of the Carolina Population Center Fellowship with training grants from the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. He also received the Future Faculty Fellowship and Weiss Urban Livability Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed his PhD. He has master degrees in mathematics from Loyola University Chicago and economics from DePaul University.