This 4-part series will introduce emerging scholars to some of the non-academic career paths that researchers with graduate training in family-related disciplines have taken. Sessions are free although you must register to attend each separately:

Conversation 1: Research in Non-Academic Research Organizations
Watch on demand

Conversation 2: Social Science Research in Non-Research Industries
Watch on demand

Conversation 3: Applied Research at NCHS and the Census
Watch on demand

Conversation 4: Science Administration at NIH
Watch on demand

The economic consequences of COVID-19 have profoundly changed the academic job market for graduate students and early career investigators (‘emerging scholars’). More than ever, emerging scholars entering the job market may want to consider career opportunities outside of academia.

Sponsored by the Marriage Strengthening Research & Dissemination Center (MAST Center) and the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR), this 4-part ‘continuing conversation’ series will introduce emerging scholars to some of the non-academic career paths that researchers with graduate training in family-related disciplines (e.g., Family Science, sociology, psychology, human development) have taken. Each conversation will focus on the career paths taken by individuals in varied settings, including: (1) research in non-academic research organizations; (2) social science research in non-research industries; (3) applied research at National Center for Health and Statistics and the Census; and (4) science administration at National Institutes of Health. 

In each conversation, two to three presenters will share insight and knowledge on:

• their career path and how they landed their current job
• how their family-related research training helps them at this job
• the types of jobs in this industry for masters and Ph.D.s with a background in family-related research
• the day to day nature of work in this industry, and the skills needed to succeed
• successful strategies for marketing oneself for current opportunities, and how this differs from marketing for academic opportunities
• their organization’s perspective/response to diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring and in the workplace

The Continuing Conversations will each last one hour. The first half of each webinar will be used to address the topics above. The second half of the webinar will be open for general Q&A. Please come with any questions you may have!

 

Conversation 1: Research in Non-Academic Research Organizations

Recorded Tuesday, Oct. 20, 11 a.m. – noon CT

Presenters:

• Brian Goesling, Associate Director of Human Services Research, Mathematica
• Allison Hyra, Senior Associate, Abt Associates
• April Wilson, Senior Research Scientist, Child Trends

Moderator: Mindy E. Scott

Brian Goesling, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at Mathematica, an employee-owned organization dedicated to improving public well-being through data, methods, policy, and practice. He currently directs an evaluation for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services of healthy marriage and relationship education programs for youth and young adults. He previously directed a seven-site random assignment evaluation of promising approaches to teen pregnancy prevention. He is an expert on program evaluation methods, particularly the design and implementation of randomized trials of social programs. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Pennsylvania State University.

Allison Hyra, Ph.D., is a Senior Associate at Abt Associates. Her research, evaluation, and evaluation technical assistance (TA) work spans numerous areas related to child and family wellbeing, including child welfare, youth programming, community college training programs, coordinated systems of care, and healthy relationships and responsible fatherhood. She currently directs a contract to provide evaluation TA to and a cross-site process evaluation of 13 grantees funded by the Administration for Children and Families to build community collaborations to strengthen families and prevent child maltreatment. Dr. Hyra serves as an Expert Member of the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families’ Technical Working Group on Fatherhood, Family Structure and Family Dynamics and as member of the Health and Wellness Committee for the Falls Church City Public School System. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago.

April Wilson, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist and Deputy Program Area Director in the Parenting and Family Dynamics research area at Child Trends. She is a developmental researcher who focuses on identifying the antecedents of stable and healthy family relationships. She serves as principle investigator and task lead on a variety of projects related to healthy romantic, co-parenting, and parenting relationships, as well as projects designed to improve use of research and evaluation methods. Dr. Wilson currently leads research on Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education program effectiveness and evaluation and serves as the co-PI on a project to build knowledge about approaches that fatherhood providers currently use, or could use, to foster healthy coparenting and romantic relationships. Previously, she was a lead on a project designed to prevent intimate partner violence in Responsible Fatherhood programs. She holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Mindy E. Scott, Ph.D., is Director of the Parenting and Family Dynamics program area at Child Trends. She is a sociologist and family demographer whose primary research interests relate to family formation, responsible fatherhood, and healthy relationships/marriage research and evaluation. Dr. Scott serves as the Project Director for OPRE’s Marriage Strengthening Research and Dissemination Center where she leads research activities focused on improving the design and implementation of Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education programs for youth, couples, parents, and individuals. Over the past ten years, Dr. Scott also has conducted research on nonresidential father involvement, engaging fathers in services, fathers’ fertility and family formation experiences, and intimate partner violence among fathers. Her current research projects explore father engagement and family relationships (or unhealthy, including intimate partner violence) among diverse types of fathers and families; for example, young fathers, formerly incarcerated fathers, nonresident fathers, and Hispanic families. Dr. Scott earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Pennsylvania State University.
 

Conversation 2: Social Science Research in Non-Research Industries

Recorded Thursday, Oct. 29, 11 a.m. – noon CT

Presenters:

• Sarah Crissey, Senior User Experience Researcher, Google
• Kim Turner, Analytics Translator, Business Intelligence Principal, Humana

Moderator: Deja Logan

Sarah Crissey, Ph.D., is a Senior User Experience (UX) Researcher at Google. She is part of the Real Estate and Workplace Services UX team that researches how Google's offices support work and uses this information to inform future design. She leads survey development for the team and conducts both quantitative and qualitative research. Prior to joining Google, Dr. Crissey was a Survey Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research and previously held positions at the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics. She holds a doctorate in Sociology with a concentration in Family Demography from the University of Texas at Austin.

Kimberly Turner, Ph.D., is a Business Intelligence Principal at Humana. Her current functional role is as an analytics translator, which allows her to combine her past research and technical experience with business acumen and strategy to create value. She stands between key analytics and business stakeholders, bridging technical expertise with the needs and strategy of the business, ensuring alignment and prioritization, and transforming insights into solutions that are both accessible and actionable. Dr. Turner is a social demographer and her research focused on the interplay between family experiences, socioeconomic status, and racial-ethnic disparities, as well as understanding the role of public policy in countering growing inequality. She has also served as a fatherhood research expert on several federal contracts and has delivered individual and group training and technical assistance to federal grantees. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.B.A. from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.

Deja Logan, B.A., is a Senior Research Assistant in the Reproductive Health and Family Formation research area at Child Trends. Ms. Logan’s research interests explore the effects of race and socioeconomic status on intimate relationships, family structure, and well-being. At Child Trends, Ms. Logan currently supports the MAST Center's research and building capacity initiatives, in addition to studying trends in reproductive health care. Prior to joining Child Trends, she interned with the Aspen Institute’s Latinos and Society program and was a summer research fellow at Columbia University through the Leadership Alliance program. Ms. Logan earned her B.A. in Sociology from Howard University, with a minor in Community Development.
 

Conversation 3: Applied Research at NCHS and the Census

Recorded Thursday, Nov. 19, 11 a.m. – noon CT

Presenters:

• Anjani Chandra, NSFG Team Lead & Principal Investigator, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Barbara Downs, Director, Federal Statistical Research Data Centers, Census Bureau
• Gladys Martinez, Statistician, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Moderator: Elizabeth Wildsmith

Anjani Chandra, Ph.D., a Senior Health Scientist in the Reproductive Statistics Branch, Division of Vital Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), has worked on the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) for nearly 30 years. For the last 7 years, she has served as NSFG Principal Investigator and Team Lead. Throughout her career in the federal sector, she has contributed to the design, implementation, and dissemination of NSFG data, particularly overseeing the development of survey questionnaires and obtaining the various clearances needed to collect and release data for public use. She has conducted research on the fertility and sexual/reproductive health of U.S. women and men. Her research interests also include social demography, perinatal health, and survey methodology. She earned her Ph.D. in demography, with a minor in epidemiology, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health (now known as the Bloomberg School of Public Health).

Barbara Downs, Ph.D., is Director of the Federal Statistical Research Data Center program at the U.S. Census Bureau. Since joining the agency in 1998, she has served in a number of research and management positions. Barbara has served as chief of the Industry and Occupation Statistics Branch within the Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division and as chief of the Data Analysis and User Education Branch within the American Community Survey Office. Her research focuses on fertility behavior, maternity leave trends, and labor force and earnings differentials. She earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan.

Gladys Martinez, Ph.D., a Statistician in the Reproductive Statistics Branch, Division of Vital Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), has worked with the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) for 20 years. In addition to helping design the survey instruments and overseeing data collection for the NSFG, she conducts research on the fertility and reproductive health of U.S. women and men. Her research interests also include family demography, timing of first births, childlessness, and survey methodology. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology with a specialty in Demography and Gender, Work, and Family from the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.

Elizabeth Wildsmith, Ph.D., is a Research Scholar at Child Trends. Her research examines fertility, relationships and marriage, the transition to adulthood, Hispanic families, and reproductive health. She currently serves as the Project Manager and Building Capacity co-lead for the Marriage Strengthening Research and Dissemination Center. She also serves as Deputy Director of the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families, where she co-leads research efforts focused on Hispanic family life and programmatic efforts aimed to support family functioning, such as Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) programs. Dr. Wildsmith earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, with a focus on family demography.

 

Conversation 4: Science Administration at NIH

Recorded Thursday, Dec. 3, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. CT

Presenters:

• Rosalind King, Associate Director for Prevention and Health Scientist Administrator, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
• Suzanne Ryan, Scientific Review Officer, National Institutes of Health

Moderator: Elizabeth Karberg

Rosalind B. King, Ph.D., is Associate Director for Prevention at National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). In addition, she serves as Program Director in the NICHD’s Population Dynamics Branch (PDB). Dr. King has guided large interdisciplinary initiatives, such as the NICHD-led Science and Ecology of Early Development program and the Work, Family, and Health Network. Currently, Dr. King chairs the NICHD Reproductive Health Interest Group and serves as a project scientist for the Science of Behavior Change program within the NIH Common Fund. She received her doctorate in sociology and demography from the University of Pennsylvania. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she joined NICHD as a social science analyst and became a health scientist administrator (program official) in 2005.

Suzanne Ryan, Ph.D., is a Scientific Review Officer (SRO) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), within the Population Sciences and Epidemiology Integrated Review Group, in NIH’s Center for Scientific Review. An SRO works in partnership with the scientific community to ensure that the scientific review group (study section) identifies the most meritorious science for funding by NIH. Dr. Ryan leads the Social Sciences and Population Studies A (SSPA) study section panel which reviews social, behavioral, and economic applications focused on health and well-being across the life course, health disparities, demographic and family processes, and economic and policy influences on health. She also coordinates the review of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award program which supports outstanding junior scientists with the intellect, scientific creativity, drive, and maturity to bypass the traditional postdoctoral training period to launch independent research careers. Before coming to NIH, Dr. Ryan was a Senior Research Scientist at Child Trends, where her research focused largely on adolescent and young adult reproductive health outcomes. Dr. Ryan earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a focus on family demography.

Elizabeth Karberg, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist at Child Trends. She is a developmental scientist with a research focus on father and family contexts that shape children’s early development. With funding from a number of government agencies, she has conducted basic and applied research to understand the intersection of fatherhood, fathering, family structure, and child wellbeing. For the past 8 years, Dr. Karberg has studied low-income, undocumented, nonresident, incarcerated, and teen fathers to understand how these understudied populations contribute to their children’s positive development. Much of her recent work has focused on examining coparenting from a fathers’ perspective. She has also evaluated Fatherhood curricula and contributed to father engagement and coparenting measurement research. Dr. Karberg earned her Ph.D. in Human Development and Quantitative Methodology from the University of Maryland, with a certification in population studies.