Nathan VanHoudnos, Statistics and Public Policy
1st year PIER, 1st year Statistics and Public Policy

Nathan VanHoudnos is from the flat Midwestern plains of Illinois and is having a rough introduction to commuting by bike in the hills of Pittsburgh. He earned a BS in Physics and a BS in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, so one would think that he would have understood the role of gravitational potential energy in cycling up a hill and chose a different house to purchase.

Nathan is interested the development of novel statistical tools to be applied to educational policy problems. His experience with the Teach for America program in rural Arkansas crystallized his interest in educational research that can be applied at the whole-school, whole-district, or whole-state levels. His experience with undergraduate research programs, ranging from biophysics in a lab in the flatlands of Illinois to geophysics field research in the Himalayas of Nepal and Tibet, taught him the clarity that statistical methods can bring to murky data. He feels that the combination of PIER with the joint PhD program in Statistics and Public Policy is a perfect fit for his goals. He is excited to get started.