John Porten Email & Phone Number

Saint Paul, Mn, Us

Saint Paul, Mn, Us

St Paul, Minnesota, United States

Integrating performance tracking across product platforms, grants, and scientific research streams to improve team performance and impact solving complex social problems, including climate change mitigation, wildfire management, human migration patterns, and more.Innovating project management to move cutting edge science and technology into practical tools used by policymakers, public service providers, and other change makers.Pioneering social science and evaluation methods to learn more about behavior in complex systems and measure the impact of big data and machine learning approaches to designing humanitarian programs.

Plan MEL programs, select data sources and methods based on deep understandings of theories of change; innovation of new tools to meet measurement challenges. Proactive management to mitigate concerns about bias, unobserved causes, and data integrity.Implement data collection protocols across multiple field sites and methods; create and administer storage and reporting systems that allow relevant stakeholders to use quantitative and qualitative data to build new reports and outputs seamlessly. Creation of public dashboards and knowledge management tools.Analyze and visualize data; effect dissemination of evidence through of impactful publications, television appearances and other media outreach, communications with diverse partners from major INGOs to grassroots advocates.Management of budget and staff, including third party contract negotiation and performance, travel arrangements, and scheduling for large, multi-year research and evaluation programs.Build and promote data collection systems for flexible but standardized implementation; training for core staff on methods and systems use. Examples include protocols for online survey administration with training video library.Build or select indictors to track hard-to-measure outcomes including incidents of violence and attitudes about sensitive topics; attention to indicators across a theory of change. Examples include work on attitudes about immigration, refugees, and harassment of state and local government officials. Foster cycles of learning to improve organizational research and fundraising strategies; thought leadership on applied research through white papers on applied methods approaches. Technical advice for grassroots violence reduction programs.Partnership management, focus on data accessibility and usage across organization, and for donors and similar stakeholders through cooperation with fundraising staff. Event hosting for stakeholder communities.

La Jolla, Ca

• Counsel individual undergraduate students with an interest in the legal profession on admission strategies, success in law school and choosing a career in law.• Design and host workshops and seminars that introduce undergraduate students to strategies for successful application to and completion of law school, and the realities of a career in the legal profession.

Greater San Diego Area

Invention of novel methods, including programming analytical packages for R, building data collection applications using ODK toolkit to maximize enumerator safety in hostile collection environments, including schools in the Dadaab displacement camps in Kenya. Plan and implement monitoring strategy for multi-method programs in services outcomes using surveys, interviews, focus groups, statistical analysis of large administrative datasets, and remote sensing using satellites; examples include tracking community fragility and human development in post-war Nepal.Management of budget and staff, including oversight of data collection at multiple sites on multiple projects and progress and grant reporting to major donors. Dissemination of findings through host community meetings; develop and maintain partnerships with stakeholders from government, INGO, and community groups, publication of peer reviewed papers, evaluation results and summaries, and technical guidance, including for sanitation and hygiene projects in South Africa. Drafting and delivery of technical advising to field partner NGOs including MEL and data collection plans, design and delivery of training courses on advanced methodology, including short courses in advanced data literacy with the Nepal Bureau of Statistics. Design and delivery of graduate courses in research design and econometrics for Masters programs in policy and social science.

Greater San Diego Area

• Designed and taught courses on comparative politics and international relations in a highly diverse associate's degree program and pipelines into four-year schools in the UC system.• Mentored students interested in four-year degree programs in social science, and in eventual careers in law.

Greater San Diego Area

• Taught research design principles and methods to advanced undergraduates and graduate students associated with USMEX research projects in capstone seminars.• Managed government and university ethical compliance for major studies with human subjects, including among at-risk populations such as minors and victims of violent crime.• Designed and carried out sampling strategy for large (up to n=8,000) survey projects, including the generation of post-survey weighting.• Trained enumerators, coordinated enumerator and subject (up to 30 enumerators and 8,000 subjects) schedules during field surveys in Mexico. • Designed qualitative interview protocols, trained and supervised interviewers, for projects with up to 300 subjects.• Oversaw cleaning and storage for ease-of-use and ethical compliance of large quantitative and qualitative datasets. •Published: Survey on Education and Migration in San Diego and Tijuana: 9th and 10th Graders. [Data file and code book]. La Jolla, CA: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. (with Melissa Floca, Ana Barbara Mungaray-Moctezuma, Max Matus, Mariana Barragan-Torres, Alfonso Basulto, and Zaira Razu Aznar).

Washington D.C. Metro Area

• Researched and reported to clients and stakeholders on the movements and activities of prominent arms trafficking networks using secondary public and classified information.• Mentored START undergraduate affiliates on research design and career development.

• Provided legal and political advising regarding tobacco advertising and intellectual property rights under international treaty law to a project targeting smoking cessation in sub-Saharan Africa.• Generated case-by-case summaries of regulations and treaty obligations for several large African markets, highlighting retaliatory litigation strategies open to tobacco firms in each.• Produced white paper for anti-tobacco initiatives to guide public health and activist networks in each market.

Milwaukee, Wi

Course Taught: The Political Economy of Violence. Students examine the origins and organizational behavior of violent groups and social movements; evaluate theories on the use of violence and competition over coercive capacity; and design and critique policy and economic responses to organized violence.

Milwaukee, Wi

• Support research project on Sahelian human trafficking networks.• Conducted interviews and archival research in Mali and Burkina Faso.• Summarized relevant literature on Sahelian trafficking and colonial history, produced literature review on political economy of human trafficking.

Interpret legal obligations and corporate structures across linguistic and cultural contexts. Manage the translation, organization and analysis of multi-lingual document pools in both litigation and M&A contexts; identify languages, hire and manage translators located in country and abroad. Organize document databases for use in complex, multi-national litigation, due diligence and other purposes; consult with clients on database content and tailor strategies to manage ongoing production and access issues. Clients include national law firms, medical device manufacturers and a multi-national media and publishing firm.

• Researched and drafted legal memoranda, dispositive and non-dispositive motions in Minnesota State and Federal courts;• Drafted appellate briefs and petitions for the Minnesota Court of Appeals and Supreme Court;• Drafted pleadings, discovery requests, and other pre-trial and trial filings documents;• Coordinated litigation strategy with clients and co-counsel.

Paramaribo, Suriname

Doctor Of Philosophy (Phd), Political Science And Government

My dissertation blends qualitative and quantitative methods to test a theory of insurgent-community relations in the context of the Nepali.

Ma, International Affairs

Ba, English

Jd