Research Beyond Publications

My work also involves building research infrastructure, mentoring students, and contributing to evidence-based institutional initiatives. These activities extend the research agenda beyond individual journal articles by creating data, developing student researchers, and connecting analysis to institutional decisions.

Origins of Ideas Research Lab

The Origins of Ideas Research Lab studies how researchers choose their agendas and how early intellectual and institutional environments shape later topic choices. This complements conventional research-policy approaches, which often focus on redirecting established work after an agenda has already formed.

Undergraduate researchers contribute to the project’s core infrastructure. They assemble structured biographical data from public CVs and biographies, improve search and retrieval workflows, and help validate measures of research topics across fields. Through this work, students learn how large research projects move from a substantive question to transparent data construction and credible measurement.

The lab combines sustained mentoring with a long-term goal: building evidence that can inform how universities and research organizations understand the origins of scientific agendas. Visit the official lab website.

Innovation Destination

I co-chair UT Dallas’s Innovation Destination initiative with Michelle Jones as part of Roadmap 2030. This university-wide effort develops a strategy for strengthening the innovation ecosystem through commercialization, industry partnerships, technology translation, entrepreneurship, and evidence-based institutional learning.

The initiative asks how a research university can become a more effective partner in translating discovery into economic and societal impact while learning systematically from its own programs. Roadmap 2030 overview · Governance and working groups

EPPS Policy Lab

The EPPS Policy Lab gives undergraduate and graduate students experience working on applied policy questions with real stakeholders. Students learn to use modern causal inference, policy evaluation, and evidence synthesis to assess competing claims and translate research into practical recommendations.

In the 2025–26 Policy Lab, co-taught with Timothy Bray, students applied appropriate analytical methods to a stakeholder-defined policy question and delivered a white paper to the project stakeholders. Some partner engagements are confidential, so project details and reports are not posted.

Professional service

National Science Foundation

Panelist, 2024–2025; multiple review panels.