Marc L. Stein

Executive Director

Marc has spent his career partnering with practitioners and researchers to build data systems and infrastructure to both support and conduct rigorous research to address practical problems. The CoLab brings together his two passions: research-practice partnerships and educational continuous improvement.

Marc has been an educator for over twenty years with experiences ranging from teaching English to middle school students in Japan, social studies to high school students in exurban Nashville, and research methods to adults pursuing PhD’s in Baltimore.

Prior to co-founding The CoLab Marc was the managing director of the Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC) and was an associate professor of education policy at Johns Hopkins University.

His research has been funded by organizations such as the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Abell Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation and has appeared in journals such as Educational Researcher, the American Education Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the American Journal of Education and Urban Education.

Marc received his PhD (Leadership and Policy Studies) from Vanderbilt University and his MS (Secondary Education) and BA (History) from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Nathaniel (Nat) Dewey

Director of Improvement Science Research

Nat is passionate about the development of practical tools to assist in continuous quality improvement in education. The Improvement CoLab is part of Nat’s vision to developing the tools and methods that will help to create a world where organizations are empowered to improve their own quality.

Prior to co-founding The CoLab Nat was an assistant research scientist at the Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC).

Nat research interests include systems thinking, causality, experimental design, time-series analysis, time-series data in education (e.g., daily attendance), and computational social science.

Nat received his PhD (Education) from Johns Hopkins University, his MAT (Secondary Education) from Fairfield University and BS (Applied Physics) from the Grove City College.