Henry M. Levin is the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is Director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education. He is also the David Jacks Professor of Higher Education and Economics, Emeritus, at Stanford University where he served from 1968-99 after working as an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. From 1978-84 he was the Director of the Institute for Research on Educational Finance at Stanford, a federally-funded R. & D. Center. From 1986-2000 Levin served as the Director of the Accelerated Schools Project, a national school reform initiative for accelerating the education of at-risk youth encompassing about 1,000 schools in 41 states. Levin has held Fulbright Professorships in Barcelona and Mexico and is on the Guest Faculty at Peking University and an Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University.

He has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Russell Sage Foundation. In 1992 the New York Times named him as one of “nine national leaders in education innovation.” Levin has been the Editor of the Review of Educational Research and the President of the American Evaluation Association and a winner of its Gunnar Myrdal Award. He is also a recipient of the Outstanding Service Award of the American Educational Finance Association and an elected member of the National Academy of Education. He has been a member and President of the Palo Alto (CA) School Board and was President (2008-09) of the Comparative and International Education Society.

Yilin Pan is currently a post-doctoral researcher jointly hired by the Department of Educational Policy and Social Analysis and the Department of Organization Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. She specializes in cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis, decision-making in resource allocation and Bayesian statistics. Dr. Pan’s research aims to facilitate the utilization of research evidence to better guide policymakers and practitioners' decision-making about resource allocation.

She has been working on applying Bayesian statistics to improve the methodologies that generate research evidence. Her efforts focus on localizing evidence of program effectiveness and cost obtained from evaluation settings to reflect the student and teacher characteristics of a specific decision-making setting, the subjective judgments of the local decision makers and the values of local stakeholders. Yilin earned a B.A. in English Literature and Linguistics and an M.A. in Higher Education at Tsinghua University, P. R. China, and a Ph.D. in Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Prior to her current job, she worked as a consultant for the World Bank's education sector.

Dr. James E. Corter is Professor of Statistics and Education at Columbia University Teachers College, where he is Chair of the Department of Human Development. His educational background includes graduate training in quantitative methods at the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, following which he earned a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Stanford University under the direction of Dr. Amos Tversky. Dr. Corter's research includes work on human learning, problem solving, behavioral decision making and psychometrics, as well as in applied statistics. This interdisciplinary work at the intersection of applied statistics, cognitive psychology, and education has shed light on diverse topics ranging from how people collaborate to solve problems to how people think and behave when making decisions to how students acquire expertise in statistics and problem solving.

Maya Escueta is a doctoral student in the Economics and Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University and a researcher at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education. Prior to coming to Teachers College, Maya worked in India for three years with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, where she oversaw a randomized controlled trial of a technology-based education intervention, and worked with key decision-makers in the South Asia region to bridge the gap between policy implementation and research. Her current research focuses on rigorous evaluations of educational programs and policies and integrating the findings into education decision making. Over the past 18 months, she has been actively engaged in developing DecisionMaker®, a tool that facilitates the implementation of an evidence-based decision-making framework based on cost-utility analysis. Maya holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Duke University, and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Columbia University.

Amritha Menon is a Software Engineer at Irving Institute, Columbia University Medical Center. She has over 20 years of systems design and development experience in the Financial Services, Health Care and Education sectors. Her software development experience ranges from developing low latency systems applicable in the Financial Services sector to designing systems incorporating health information, privacy and security for the NHS in the UK. Amritha was the lead software engineer in the development of CostOut, a tool that facilitates cost and cost-effectiveness analysis for researchers and education decision-makers. She is currently developing Biomedical Informatics systems at the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.

Amritha has a Masters Degree in Computer Applications from Bharathiar University, India, and is a resident of India, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Atsuko Muroga is a Ph.D. student in the Economics and Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also a Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education. Prior to her doctoral program, she worked for the World Bank where she was involved in various research and investment projects related to youth and education in Cambodia, Mongolia, Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, and Vietnam. Her recent research interests include early childhood education, child development, early reading education, wraparound services, and university-school-community partnerships. She holds an M.A. in Economics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, an M.A. in Educational Administrative and Policy Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Soka University of America.

Aasiya Kazi is a researcher at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently reading for an M.Phil. in South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, England. Her research interests include gender, education and human rights. Aasiya holds a B.A. in Government from Smith College and an M.A. in Human Rights Studies with a concentration in gender and education from Columbia University.

Anna Kushner is a researcher and Ph.D. student studying Education Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her recent research focuses on decision-making in education and she is developing a course for decision-makers on applying cost-utility analysis to problems of practice. She is also working on a cost-effectiveness analysis of a math professional development program as part of an EIR study. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she taught middle school and worked as a mixed methods researcher at the New York City Department of Education. Anna holds an M.A. in Education Policy from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a B.A. in Studies in Women and Gender from the University of Virginia.