Lauren Amos

Lauren Banks Amos is a principal researcher at Mathematica. She has 20 years of experience in program evaluation, technical assistance, and design research supporting federal, state, and local education agency efforts to improve disparities and disproportionality in the public education, juvenile justice, and child welfare systems.

Building on a background in information technology and research in behavioral economics, cognitive science, and visual analytics, Amos specializes in designing interactive decision support tools for practitioners (for example, risk assessment dashboards and cost-benefit simulations). Her experience includes helping clients such as the U.S. Department of Education, National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and New York City Public Schools monitor, measure, and maximize the social, behavioral, technological, and economic influence and impact of their investments in human capital. These investments include needs-based school funding models, collective impact for community-wide transformation, alternatives to exclusionary school discipline, STEM talent development, pay-for-performance initiatives, and online communities of practice.

Amos’s current work includes serving on the Institute of Education Sciences’ Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic as the principal investigator for a study on school discipline in Maryland and as the co-principal investigator for a study on school climate in Pennsylvania. She also leads the external evaluation team for the U.S. Department of Education’s Region 2 Comprehensive Center; provides evaluation design support to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Bright Spots in Middle Years Math Research & Development Program grantees; and leads a landscape analysis of evaluation technical assistance initiatives supporting the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and other human services programs for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation.

Amos joined Mathematica in 2019. She has a Ph.D. in the learning sciences from Northwestern University and a B.A. in public policy studies and English from Duke University.