Kate Place

Kate Place is a senior researcher specializing in technical assistance and program evaluation for K-12 education. She has expertise in providing technical assistance to education organizations and agencies to design theories of change, build capacity, generate evidence to improve programs, and evaluate program efficacy.

Since joining Mathematica in 2014, Place has worked on K-12 education projects spanning various topic areas. Currently, she serves as the Mathematica project director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Middle Years Math portfolio. As project director, she leads a team of researchers in providing evaluation technical assistance to grantees working to improve math outcomes of students in grades 3 to 9 who are Black, Latino, and/or experiencing poverty. The technical assistance focuses on generating evidence to improve program design and implementation and understand what works, for whom, and in what context. As part of this work, Place has helped develop a suite of measurement and evaluation tools for grantees, organizations, funders, and researchers.

Place also has provided technical assistance to school districts across the United States to design their own rapid-cycle evaluations and use data for decision making. She helped develop the Evidence to Insights or e2i Coach, an online toolkit to conduct short-cycle evaluations. In addition, she served as a deputy methodologist for various practice areas of the What Works Clearinghouse.

Place holds an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Before joining Mathematica, she was an education researcher at Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile.