Catherine Asher is a doctoral student in the Education Policy & Program Evaluation program at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on the impacts of large scale literacy programs and policies and the methodological investigation of impact heterogeneity in literacy interventions. Prior to coming to Harvard, she worked at social policy research firm, MDRC, on the evaluations of Response to Intervention and Reading Partners. She has earned a B.A. in Economics from Dartmouth College and a M.A. in Statistics from Harvard University.

Jackie E. Relyea served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the READS Lab at Harvard. Her research focuses on academic language and literacy development of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Her current research involves investigating a classroom-based intervention model that emphasizes the integration of literacy instruction in content-area subjects to develop language-minority students’ domain-specific knowledge, academic language and literacy, and higher-order thinking skills. Prior to joining to the READS lab, she held research positions at various research institutions, including UNC-Chapel Hill, Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, MetaMetrics Inc., and the University of Houston. She is currently an assistant professor of literacy education at North Carolina State University.