J-PAL North America News: 2024 Evidence Champion Awardees

This month, we are honored to present our second annual Evidence Champion award to two individuals who have made significant contributions to the field of evidence-based policymaking throughout their remarkable careers: Alicia Sasser Modestino (Northeastern University), our researcher recipient, and AJ Gutierrez (Saga Education), our partner recipient. 

Both awardees have demonstrated a deep dedication to building evidence and supporting the scale-up of evidence-based programs to help young people. Alicia—in collaboration with the City of Boston—has studied summer youth employment programs and found they improve the well-being of young people across a range of outcomes. Building on this research, Boston has scaled up these programs to help improve opportunities for young people in the city. AJ—who himself benefited from an intensive tutoring model—-has spent his career catalyzing randomized evaluations of Saga’s tutoring program, which has been found to consistently improve math outcomes for high school students. He now advocates for policy change to support the national scale-up of evidence-based tutoring.

Today, both summer youth employment programs and high-impact tutoring are two especially promising evidence-based strategies for helping young people thrive in the United States. At J-PAL North America, we aim to support researchers and our partners in continuous research to understand how and why a program works, for which populations, and how to increase program equity and cost-effectiveness. We applaud AJ and Alicia for their dedication to identifying and scaling strategies to improve the lives of students from low-income families, demonstrating how evidence-based insights can transform social programs. 

We are so grateful for our partners who join us on our mission to alleviate poverty. 

Happy holidays and best wishes in the new year,

Matthew Notowidigdo | Co-Scientific Director, J-PAL North America

Read more:

• Recognizing J-PAL North America's 2024 Evidence Champions: Our second annual Evidence Champion award is honoring two Evidence Champions, Alicia Modestino as our researcher recipient, and Antonio Gutierrez as our partner recipient. Read more about Alicia's and AJ's work on the J-PAL blog.
• New J-PAL webpage features opportunities and resources on researching racial equity: As a new resource for those seeking to advance racial equity research, we launched a webpage to highlight racial equity funding opportunities, racial equity focused research projects, and tools and resources for researching racial equity.
• New memo: Policy experiment stations to accelerate state and local government innovation: J-PAL North America’s Co-Executive Director Laura Feeney—alongside the Social Science Research Council, University of Chicago Urban Labs, California Policy Lab, and The People Lab—authored a Day One Memo for the Federation of American Scientists calling for the expansion of state and local government capacity to rigorously evaluate their programs.
• Open enrollment for the DEDP MicroMasters Program: The MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP) offers online courses for policymakers, researchers, and students looking to generate and use evidence to inform policy.