Putting Psych Science to Work for Government: Office of Evaluation Sciences
Based at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) is a team of interdisciplinary experts that works across the federal government to help agencies build and use evidence. OES provides government-wide expertise and support on leading practices for evidence-building and evaluations, and partners with federal agencies to answer priority questions using rapid and rigorous evaluation. To date, OES has completed over 70 randomized evaluations with dozens of agency partners.
The three presenters in this session have a background in psychological sciences, but they took three different career paths to get to OES. They’ll describe those career paths and the day-to-day work of being part of OES.
You will hear from:
Russ Burnett divides his time between project work and serving as Methods Team Lead at the Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES), supporting the team’s commitment to reliable, reproducible, and transparent methods. He is a cognitive psychologist with a research background in judgment and decision making, causal reasoning, and culture and cognition. Prior to joining OES in 2016, he worked as a social science methodologist at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), where he advised on research design and methods and conducted analysis for projects on a variety of federal programs and policies. Russ has also worked as a survey methodologist for government and private-sector clients. He has a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University.
Heather Kappes earned a PhD in Social Psychology at New York University before joining the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2012. She is part of the LSE’s Marketing group in the Department of Management, where she teaches undergraduate, graduate, and executive courses on both consumer behaviour (spelled the British way!) and marketing, and motivation and goals. Her current research looks at how adults and children think about wealth and spending, and how those beliefs predict their spending and financial resilience. She uses a variety of methods including lab, online, and field experiments in the UK, US, and elsewhere. Heather is interested in ensuring the quality of research in psychology and related fields, participated in the Reproducibility Project: Psychology and Many Labs projects, and does periodic outreach on science in UK schools with the STEM Ambassadors program. She is a Fellow at the Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) in 2020-21.
Mary Clair Turner joined the Office of Evaluation Sciences in 2017 and currently serves as a Portfolio Lead. Mary Clair was previously a Research Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Poverty Lab. Her research uses econometric and mixed methods techniques to examine how interventions that target the development of psychological skills or access to social resources impact decision making, particularly during educational transitions such as the transition from high school to college. She draws on insights from human development to focus on sensitive periods of development when interventions may induce the largest effects. At the Poverty Lab, she led an impact evaluation of a soccer-based nutrition and character development program for elementary school students in Chicago. Before graduate school, Mary Clair was a Technical Research Assistant at MDRC in the Young Adult and Postsecondary Education group where she helped conduct large-scale randomized control trials of interventions in community colleges. She holds a BA in Math from Washington and Lee University and a PhD in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University.
