Careers in Evaluation and Community-Engaged Research

Jessica Sperling, PhD, is Manager of Evaluation & Engagement for the Duke Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) & Duke Education and Human Development Incubator (EDHi). Jessica will discuss her path to evaluation and careers in evaluation - an area of work that utilizes PhD conceptual and empirical training in applied settings. She will also discuss how interested postdocs could gain experience in evaluation through SSRI/EHDi Evaluation & Engagement.

SPEAKER: Jessica Sperling is Manager of Evaluation & Engagement for the Duke Social Science Research Institute & Education and Human Development Incubator (EDHi). She is dedicated to developing community-engaged and applied research, improving programs through responsive and collaborative evaluation, as well as developing educational programming with hands-on learning opportunities. Prior to joining SSRI, she was a Research Analyst in the CUNY Office of Research, Evaluation, and Program Support and also managed the research and evaluation program for StoryCorps, where she developed an overall framework for evaluation, as well as specific data collection and analysis projects. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she focused on immigration, race/ethnicity, and inequality and was funded by the NSF, the Social Science Research Council, and Zeit Stiftung/Bucerius.