Lora Cohen-Vogel Email & Phone Number

Lora Cohen-Vogel is the Frank A. Daniels, Jr Endowed Chair, Professor of Public Policy and Education and directs both the PhD program in Policy, Leadership and School Improvement and the Interprofessional Graduate Certificate in Improvement Science and Implementation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bringing nearly $30 million in external research funding, Lora has expertise in the mobilization of research for policy formation and system improvement. As Associate Director of the National Center for Scaling Up Effective Schools, Lora spent five years helping to bring to scale evidence-based interventions in two of the nation’s largest school districts, interventions that eventually reached over 50,000 high school students and continue to this day.Lora currently sits as an appointed member on the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine's Committee on the Future of Education Research. Among the first to have published on improvement science in peer-reviewed journals in education, Lora speaks widely on the topic at national conferences and with school and district leaders. As a Vice President of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association, her keynote address argued for a new R&D enterprise in education that pushes beyond identifying “what works.” Lora writes: “As important as adopting practices supported with sound scientific evidence is to the goal of improved outcomes, so too is developing in educators the necessary know-how for those practices to spread fast and effectively.”Lora is currently a Co-PI of the Early Learning Network, a consortium of six research universities working to advance understanding of the policies and practices that narrow the achievement gap and maintain early success as children transition from preschool into kindergarten and beyond. In North Carolina, she is currently partnering with local education agencies as well as the ncIMPACT initiative to develop an improvement-focused infrastructure in school districts and local education collaboratives across the state. She has also worked with the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore City Public Schools and the Carnegie Foundation in 10 school districts across the U.S. to build capacity for using improvement science to implement deeper learning practice in public schools. With colleagues, Lora just published The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Focused Educational Research (2022) and is working to get out the 1000 page AERA Handbook on Education Policy Research next year.

Listed skills include Teaching, Research, University Teaching, Program Evaluation, and 3 others.