Skip to main content

Two IPR Scholars Elected to the National Academy of Education

Nichole Pinkard and Elizabeth Tipton join eight other IPR faculty in the prestigious organization

Get all our news

Subscribe to newsletter

Nichole and Beth’s acceptance into the National Academy of Education confirms what so many of us already know—that their work is having a significant impact on education research.”

Andrew Papachristos
IPR Director & the John G. Searle Professor of Sociology

Headshots of professor Nichole Pinkard and Elizabeth Tipton

On Jan. 21, IPR faculty Nichole Pinkard and Elizabeth Tipton were elected to the National Academy of Education (NAEd), along with 20 other prominent experts in education research and policy. They join eight other IPR faculty who are members of the NAEd.

Carol Lee, president of NAEd and a professor emerita at Northwestern’s School of Education and School Policy, said in a press release announcing the new members that education is crucial for preparing students to navigate the challenges of the modern world.

“Our distinguished colleagues now joining the National Academy of Education bring the range of expertise and commitments needed for our field to update itself and wrestle with these complexities continuously,” Lee said. “We are delighted and honored that this cohort of scholars will join us in tackling these complexities.”

Pinkard, the Alice Hamilton Professor of Learning Science, and Tipton, a professor of statistics and data science, join 240 NAEd members, including 15 faculty from Northwestern.

“Nichole and Beth’s acceptance into the National Academy of Education confirms what so many of us already know—that their work is having a significant impact on education research,” said IPR Director Andrew Papachristos. “Through Beth’s work trying to develop sophisticated methods to accurately assess results and Nichole’s engaged work grounded in young people’s experiences, they are each coming at challenges in education and tackling them in different ways.”

Nichole Pinkard: Designing More Equitable Systems for Youth

As a learning scientist, Pinkard focuses on creating learning opportunities for youth in schools, libraries, and other community spaces. She co-founded Digital Youth Network, which helps young people develop technical, creative, and analytical digital literacies. Pinkard calls this educational infrastructure the “connective tissue” of learning.

Through the Digital Youth Network, she has developed many programs to increase access to opportunities, including the Cities Learn Platform, which schools and community groups use in several states. Another platform Pinkard co-founded called YOUmedia gives teenagers access to thousands of books and a variety of tools to help them build their digital media skills. YOUmedia started as a partnership between the Chicago Public Library and the MacArthur Foundation and is now at libraries across the country.

Currently, Pinkard is studying how teaching-based social networks and technology can support community-level learning models.

She earned a master’s in computer science and a PhD in learning sciences from Northwestern. Pinkard was named a fellow of the International Society of Learning Sciences last year, and she is also a fellow in the American Educational Research Association.

Elizabeth Tipton: Using Statistics to Improve Lives

Tipton co-directs the Statistics for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice (STEPP) Center with IPR statistician and education researcher Larry Hedges. She develops state-of-the-art methods for designing field experiments and analyzing their results, conducting large randomized trials that produce more widely generalizable findings, and synthesizing multiple studies in meta-analyses.

Tipton developed a free online tool called The Generalizer, which creates sampling and recruitment plans for randomized trials in K–12 education and assesses how generalizable a study’s results are to different populations.

She is developing methods and tools to strengthen large randomized trials, especially in education and psychology. Her research in meta-analysis—the combination of results across many smaller trials—examines modeling and adjusting for dependence between effect sizes. In a new line of research, she has begun studying ways to make statistical information more useful for decision-making, such as through improved data visualizations and summaries.

She earned a master’s in sociology from the University of Chicago and a PhD in statistics from Northwestern. Tipton is an elected fellow of both the American Statistical Association and the American Educational Research Association.

Nichole Pinkard is the Alice Hamilton Professor of Learning Sciences, faculty director of the Office of Community Education Partnerships, and an IPR associate. Elizabeth Tipton is professor of statistics and data science, co-director of the Statistics for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice, or STEPP, Center, and an IPR fellow.

Published: January 30, 2025.