Beyond “Does It Work?”: Laura Peck on Policy, Evidence, and Impact

EJB Talks returns for Season 14 with Dean Stuart Shapiro speaking with Laura Peck, one of our newest Public Policy Associate Professors and a Principal Faculty Fellow with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development . Laura discusses her journey from undergraduate activism to policy analysis, a PhD, tenure at Arizona State, and more than a decade at Abt Associates. She shares how that work shaped her focus on careful, policy-relevant research, specifically taking about her evaluation of the federal Health Profession Opportunity Grant (HPOG) program. Laura emphasizes that the real question of her research isn’t just whether programs work, but really how and for whom they work. With her return to academia at Bloustein, she is looking forward to getting back into the classroom to help students understand how programs run in the real world and whether they’re actually helping the people they’re meant to serve. Her goal is to give them the tools to figure out what’s working, what needs fixing, and how to make smart decisions about public programs in government and nonprofit spaces. For the full transcript of this recording visit our website https://bloustein.rutgers.edu/ejbtalks/.